Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature. Burchfield’s development in the early years of the twentieth century merged an appreciation for decorative surfaces, notably those of Asian and Near Eastern art, with an imagination that was fueled by his own his experiences. Raised in Salem, Ohio, by his widowed mother, he had spent his childhood gathering impressions and images from the landscape around him. From 1912 to 1916 Burchfield studied at the Cleveland School of Art, where his youthful admiration for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Edmond Dulac led him to consider a career as an illustrator. Upon graduation he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, but the few months he spent there in the autumn of 1916 confirmed his aversion to both figure drawing and to city life. Despite an encouraging contact with Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who showed his work at her Sunwise Turn Bookshop, he decided to leave New York before the end of the year. Burchfield described the months that followed his return to Ohio as his “golden year.” Employed by day as an accountant at the W. H. Mullins Company, he communed with nature on evenings and weekends, producing sheets of drawings and watercolors that vibrated with the joy of his homecoming. In later years he would come back to the images of 1917, incorporating them into larger compositions that attempted to recapture the freedom and vision of his youthful discoveries. Some of these early drawings were what he called “idea notes,” including components of plant life or effects of weather that comprised a sign language of nature. In others, such as <em>Violets</em>, a large watercolor of 1917, his conception was fully edited and staged. In the foreground, animated violets chant an overture for a grand performance spring. In a clearing, framed by formidable sentinels, a stand of tree trunks elevates a shimmery pyramidal bower. Burchfield told his dealer, Frank Rehn, that <em>Violets</em> was one of his favorites and asked him to submit it to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1944 in response to the Museum’s request to see “a few of his finest early things” for purchase consideration.RISD Museum director Gordon Washburn expressed interest in the early work when the Museum lent Three Boats in Winter to a Burchfield retrospective exhibition organized by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1944. A former director of the Albright, Washburn recalled Violets from a visit to Burchfield’s studio in Gardenville, New York, and mentioned this when he wrote to Burchfield on May 9, 1944, to ask if he would send a selection of early watercolors for RISD’s consideration. The artist’s dealer, Frank K. M. Rehn, responded on June 6, 1944, commenting that Violets was also one of Burchfield’s favorites (Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries correspondence, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/frank-km-rehn-galleries-records-9193/more#section_1). Burchfield had found Washburn dismissive of American Modernism during his time in Buffalo. In a journal entry dated January 16, 1939, he described Washburn as “one of the younger museum directors who is trained at the Fogg Museum in a sort of cultural vacuum… . His attitude & use of French terms were galling to me.” Describing Washburn’s European bias, he noted (January 21, 1939) that he “would stand in front of one of the most trivial and inane of Matisse’s effort[s], and say with the air of God delivering the commandments from Mount Sinai ‘This is a great picture.’” Charles Ephraim Burchfield, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 562. The respite of Burchfield’s golden year was short. Inducted into the army in 1918, he was sent to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, where he was assigned first to field artillery and then to the camouflage section before being dismissed at the war’s end with the rank of sergeant. During the next two years, he turned from animistic nature imagery and began to document the landscape of towns, often stripping them of color and imposing a spare architectural geometry.Michael D. Hall analyzes Burchfield’s distinctive Modernism in “Cones, Cubes, and Brooding Shacks: Charles Burchfield’s House Pictures 1918–1920,” in Charles Burchfield 1920: The Architecture of Painting (New York, D.C. Moore Gallery, 2009); Gates Down is illustrated on page 93. Burchfield included an illustration of Gates Down in his 1928 essay “On the Middle Border,” Creative Arts, 3, September 1928. A snowy Pennsylvania Railroad crossing at New Garden Street in Salem is the setting for <em>Gates Down</em>, a 1920 watercolor whose composition is activated by the racing diagonal of the track and the smoke of an oncoming train. The gate has been lowered by a switchman—a rare Burchfield figure—who is silhouetted in the lantern-like tower. Opposite, the low roofs of a factory are overshadowed by a monolithic industrial block whose chimney spews brown fumes. Dark outlines and broad strokes of opaque pigment present a somber contrast to the mood of Burchfield’s earlier naturalist subjects, but he generates energy in the locomotive’s burning headlamp and in the sparking triangle of the signal lamp. Like all of nature’s humours, snow and ice were not, of themselves, hostile elements to Burchfield. After moving to Buffalo in 1921 to take a job with the H. M. Birge & Sons wallpaper company, he was attracted by the sights of the local waterfront in winter, and soon began to paint the freighters on Lake Erie. Their commerce restricted by the lake’s icy manacles, the passive ships served frequently as models for Burchfield, and were the subjects of several paintings. In 1933 he completed <em>Three Boats in Winter</em>, a composition observed in the Buffalo harbor near the Ohio Street Bridge. It was purchased the following year by the Rhode Island School of Design after being shown at the Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings, October 3–30, 1934, no. 9. Three Boats in Winter (watercolor), lent by the Rehn Gallery. Although Burchfield’s paintings of the twenties and thirties, including the Buffalo sites, were often described by critics as portraits of the “American Scene,” his own stated intentions resisted the limitations of this interpretation. “While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its ‘genius loci’ as it were, my chief aim in painting it,” he wrote, “is the expression of a completely personal mood.”Charles Burchfield, Monograph Number 13 (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1945), n.p. Foreword by Charles Burchfield. By the late thirties Burchfield identified a “determination to come to grips with nature in a way I have never done before.”Burchfield, Journals, November 29, 1938, 486. He had already begun to reexamine his work from 1917–1918 and felt compelled to recall the intensity of his youthful experiences and to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness of that period. His watercolors of the next two decades built on the early drawings, both literally and figuratively. In the 1940s he devised a complex methodology that involved attaching additional strips of paper to drawings he had made in 1917 and then expanding the original motifs in order to create larger paintings. He also found new ways to employ old favorite subjects, such as the striped birch trees that he used in two of his earliest wallpaper designs.In 1921, Burchfield created two wallpaper designs in which birch trees were the dominant motif. One of these, The Birches, in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, was based on this watercolor from 1917: https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1975-092-000-the-birches/ The drawing <em>Tree Interior</em>, which features the trunks of striped birches, was inscribed “Study for Summer Afternoon.”The verso of the drawing bears the inscription: “Tree Interior” 1948 / A Study for “Summer Afternoon.” A large 1917–1948 watercolor with that title includes aspects of the drawing’s jagged black halo and energized sky, suggesting nature’s inherent potential for change, while its armature of branches and exploding crown of foliage found their way into later paintings.While not directly quoted in these paintings, Tree Interior represents Burchfield’s process of using drawings to establish motifs and to inject renewed fervor into his later work. Summer Afternoon, 1917–1948; watercolor, 48 x 42 in., Collection Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Gift of Mrs. Lawrence H. Bloedel http://contentdm.williams.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/wcma&CISOPTR=36&CISOBOX=1&REC=12 July Sunlight Pouring Down, 1952; watercolor on paper, 35 x 26 in., on permanent loan to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2013-0704-001-july-sunlight-pouring-down/ Summer Solstice (In Memory of the American Chestnut Tree), 1961–1966; watercolor on paper, 54 x 60 in. Image from the archives of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:v2012-015-001-summer-solstice-in-memroy-of-the-american-chestnut-tree/ <em>Tree Interior</em> may have been made on site during Burchfield’s daylong stretches in the woods and meadows near his Gardenville, New York, home, or drawn later as he recalled “great cumulus clouds piled up into huge towering masses, overhead, blotting out the sun, and casting a deep shadow over the trees and fields.”Burchfield, Journals, July 1, 1948, 518. Burchfield’s reconstructions served as springboards to his next phase of abstract naturalism. When reapplied in maturity, the imagery that he had invented and codified in his youth became an inspired and flexible vocabulary. Of the many themes in nature that Burchfield continued to address, the change of seasons proved among the most fecund to his imagination. The drawing <em>Oncoming Spring</em>, a preliminary sketch for a painting of the same title,Oncoming Spring, 1954; watercolor on paper mounted on board, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 in.; Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, purchased in part with support from the Western New York Foundation and the Olmsted Family in Memory of Harold L. Olmsted, 1990. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:1990-003-000-oncoming-spring/ is one of a series of works that dramatizes the conflicting, coincidental stages that mark the end of one season and the beginning of the next. With this drawing, made three years before the completed painting, the basic elements of the painting’s structure were set in place. In a barren wooded setting, variations of crescent-shaped forms float among dark slender tree trunks. Identified as conventions in Burchfield’s 1917 sketchbook, the crescents were often used to express feelings or moods.See Charles Burchfield, Sketchbook: Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State. The conventions are widely discussed in the Burchfield literature. In later years the crescent was described by Burchfield (letter to Theodore Braasch, September 13, 1959, courtesy Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as “differing in meaning of course according to its position.” Face up, it could be “eerie or menacing—at best a pixie mischievousness”; face down, it could express “astonishment, wariness, foreboding, and also sadness, nostalgia, or worship of God,” and even “heat and its discomfort.” Pockets of wind, sound and movement might also be suggested by variations of this shape. But here they exist as windows in the winter landscape, revealing lightly sketched images of spring growth. Above their outlines a birdlike form ascends as a symbol of the earth’s rebirth in the coming season. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, ' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, ' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, ' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, ' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, ' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, ' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, ' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, ' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, ' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, ' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, ' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, ' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, ' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, ' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, ' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, ' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, ' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, ' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, ' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, ' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process(' <strong><em>to sit for a portrait</em></strong> I soften my focus on William Merritt Chase’s <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. If the sitter were to look out at me now, across temporal, spatial (and representational) gulfs, she would see my profile as I encounter her own. I set my head high at the end of my neck as if suspended by a wire above and let my chin dip slightly. My nose does not slope as smoothly as hers, but it is about the same length to look down. When I look back, I notice more. I had not given the ends of my lips nor my shoulders to gravity as freely as she does. The wrists were right: they slide off her forearms and release into her lap, her hands cupping a fan (I am, unfortunately, fan-less). Either my chair was too short or my legs too long, but I couldn’t approximate the distance between her feet and the ground. <strong>in a frothy pink dress</strong> Along with those who have previously recorded their looking at <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I focused first on the dress, admiring Chase’s expertise in modeling fabrics with brushwork at once precise and spontaneous. The dress hasn’t settled. Its fabrics fold upon each other to create opacities which are reconfigured as soon as they are set. They are almost always ready to again be moved by the figure wearing them. Multiple previous interpretations refer to the dress as being “frothy”.RISD Museum, Portrait of a Lady in Pink,http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/ 896_portrait_of_a_lady_in_pink (Mar. 3, 2016). Such attention is paid to Chase’s skill in painting the dress, the sitter who wears it becomes little more than a dress form. An exhibit catalogue entry for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> goes as far to say, “There is no interest in the psychological presence of the sitter; rather, the emphasis is all placed on her exterior shell.”RISD Museum Catalogue, 122. What would it mean to make a claim for the interiority of the sitter against the grain of previous writing about <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, not as a way to know more specifically the sitter herself, but to interrogate the suppositions of feminine exteriority as it relates to my own identifications with this portrait and portraits of similar subjects? What problems does the portrait sitter’s interior excessiveness pose for looking at these kinds of portraits as well as my own identifications with them? Why is taking on their denied interiority so desirable? <strong>trace her silhouette</strong> I return to the lady in pink at the shadow under her left foot. I hadn’t considered her physicality until I noticed that small shadow, a space between her foot and the ground. Tracing from her foot, under the dress, up legs, hips, a stomach, rounding her dripping shoulders, I am caught at her one visible eye, her gaze slightly downcast. I recognize a melancholia in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, a melancholia I have previously recognized in similar portraits of female sitters (other “Ladies in … “). Their melancholia is betrayed by feet hovering just above the carpet, a curved spine, an inward rotation of the shoulders, or limp wrists. I find myself drawn to these portraits for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Their indirect gaze stops me in gallery spaces, where I see myself seeing them. They are suddenly close, a closeness that is discomforting yet completely familiar. It is as if I’ve caught something in them, something they’ve caught in me. This closeness I perform in trying on the pose of this lady in pink. Her pose sits easily on my bones. I can imagine I feel what she feels, all but the horribly itchy fabric. I do not witness its movement at my movement (perhaps the swinging of my legs, brushing the rust-colored carpet … ) just as the sitter does not seem to witness it. I do not hear it either. In softening my gaze, I am not here. The gap in subjectivity the gaze is said to represent widens. In this gap, I begin to tease out identifications with these “Ladies in … ” portraits and the ways in which they may touch me across time. Looking at the lady in pink, my own identifications are potentially threatened by this desire and performed embodimentAmelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identifications and the Visual Arts (Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2012), 9.. The gaps, both spatially and temporally opened up by softening my gaze and touching across time, reveal the contingency of how I might be seen sitting for a portrait, here and now. My own interpretive investment with these kinds of portraits in general, and with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> in particular, is based on a recognition of the contingency of our various identifications as well as the very real structures, privileges, and disadvantages such identity positions historically (dis)allow. Perhaps I am interested in untangling the denied interiority of the sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> because I recognize similar structures in the diagnoses of homosexual identifications. In the developmental logic of “Western” aesthetics (also contingent), the proper subject, of which the artist is the exemplar, has a rich inner life. Their fully formed interiority is in constant free play between imagination and understandingJones, 31.. Our melancholy upsets this notion of interiority. I see a glimmer of recognition in the way the lady in pink sits for her portrait, the previous writing about which denies her any interiority and thus proper subjecthood. Am I drawn to these portraits to see inwardness turned outward again? <strong>and catch her looking</strong> The sitter for <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> was one of Chase’s students, Marietta Benedict CottonRISD Museum Catalogue, 124.. As I see myself sitting in Cotton’s pose and taking on her melancholia, I am also performing the stereotype of the sad young gay man. Richard Dyer traces this stereotype through multiple representational locations in which “to be homosexual was both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable.Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116–36.” By identifying with the sitter in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, I am, at first looking (unknowingly), then with this writing (knowingly) engaging with (relishing in!) this stereotype which Dyer defines as an image of otherness that is complex, intense, and contradictory. The lineage of the sad young man is multiple, with sites in Christian representations, the image of the Romantic poet, the Bildungsroman, the third-sex theory of sexuality, Freudianism, the invention of adolescence, and urbanismDyer, 117–18.. The sad young man, as formed by the pulp, noir, and romance novels Dyer surveys, is often found in his text at a point of decision. The sadness is a result of the proposed position homosexual identification may afford him, particularly in novels from the 1950s and ’60s. These novels propose melancholy as a cusp on which the sad young man is poised before knowing that he “is” or is “becoming” queerDyer, 128–29.. He may turn away from or give into his homosexuality. We sit in our party dresses not sure whether we should return to the party. The party’s music is muffled just enough to allow us to hear the fabrics’ froth. While my, as well as Dyer’s, melancholia differ from these narratives of sad young men, we both identify with this cusp of possibility. Melancholy is the holding pattern on the way to “proper” (in the case of the sad young men narrative, white) masculinity. When resolved, the narratives of the sad young man deliver a reassurance of the fixity of sexual (gendered and racial) identifications. “The world before that sad young man offers four resolutions: death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down.Dyer, 131.” Normality is secured in the “proper” heterosexual relations with a woman. I am troubling these sites of representation and locating my own melancholic proclivities with the <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> to claim precisely what is denied these sad young men as well as feminized subjects: a legitimate subject position removed from narratives of uplift, progress, or errancy Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 451.. Melancholy, through these foggy windows separating myself from the lady in pink, could be understood then as an affective attachment. Through spending time with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> and looking at the rift this affective attachment opens up, I can come to think melancholy not as a psychological failure, but rather as a site of publicity. We can possibly take off our pink dresses. Although it is expertly represented in <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>, the potentiality of the portrait lies not in its aesthetic finery and surface, but rather in its ability as an art object to open outward beyond limited notions of identification. In performing a touch across time and space, I am in effect giving the present back to myself. <strong>looking where I cannot</strong> Chase models Cotton’s form and skin in what has been described as an academic fashion. Her solid gray-green arms and face stand in direct contrast to the widely varied and fluid pinks of the dress. Chase later painted Cotton in <em>Portrait of Lady in Black</em>. In black, Cotton stands with her head cocked, looking straight out from the canvas. Although facing outward, she twists away and spirals her body to her left. Her wrists bend as her hands rest on the arms of a chair. Here Cotton has made a decision. She pulls back into the shallow pictorial space, torqueing away from me. Can melancholy be comprised of these gestures of release and denial? As the hands are let off the end of wrists, the shoulders hang off the spine, and eyes are let loose to be elsewhere. It is in this elsewhere I think I am interested. <strong>find the light in this gallery</strong> Dyer reproduces the covers of the sad young man novels to visually demonstrate their melancholic mood. The lighting on the covers and the portraits carves out jawlines: the young men’s soften as Cotton’s becomes more distinct. The points on their bodies furthest from the light bend toward the background. Cheekbones are made cliff-faces, and eye sockets deep-set valleys. They are stilled in this light, posed and poised, on a cusp of indecision. <strong>stand in that spot</strong> While the majority of the covers feature sad young men in singles or pairs, they occasionally also depict female figures. As characters in the narratives of the sad young men, women are often posited as a (“correct”) sexual alternative for the burgeoning homosexual. Through proper relations with this figure, the sad young man is able to demonstrate he is capable of heterosexual relations. Through this relation, the sad young man is no longer sad. Dyer also claims the sad young man may be desirable to the female heterosexual character. I am imagining <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em> as a cover for a novel about a sad young man. Might he be wearing that dress? Or would we have to add him in the frame, expand the stretched canvas to allow them to share the shallow pictorial plane without touching? How might we rewrite this stereotypical narrative to allow them to touch without the proposition of “correct” relations? Is there a time, now or at the painting of this portrait, in which this narrative could conceivably exist? Has it not yet arrived? <strong>wait for our eyes to meet.</strong> I stand in the spot where I imagine Cotton to be looking. I look back at her, back at the pigment in oil, off of Chase’s brush. I revel in what Dyer terms “delicious melancholia” here with <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>. I am proposing an optimistic mode of attachment in the repetition of our melancholia in writing about it. I am attempting repetition of this affect situated around a proposed lack. Perhaps the trick to performing this touch requires another viewer. Perhaps you can shift around the gallery as I situate myself in the vicinity of Cotton’s gaze. You can find the location at which Cotton and myself approximate touch. You can close one eye and flatten your perspective. You can imagine what Cotton and I may share with each other across space and time. You can watch me mirror Cotton’s pose and try on her dress. Maybe your own wrists will go limp, your gaze soften, eyes slide down the bridge of your nose, as if melancholy were communicable. You wouldn’t notice it until later, until you’ve moved on from seeing me see <em>Portrait of a Lady in Pink</em>: a cold you’ll never be able to shake; a cold you’ll never desire to be rid of. Tyler French Brown University, MA 2017, Public Humanities ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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