Works of naive American art featured at the National Gallery of Art
As told by most museums the history of American painting before modernism is usually a fairly dull tale. The narrative is dominated by artists with academic training who emulated European models. And all too often their work is dispensed in homogenous chunks, sorted according to big names or schools, periods and subjects.
You know the drill: it reaches from John Singleton Copley and colonial portraitists to the Ashcan School. In between come Hudson River, Luminist, genre and trompe l’oeil paintings and works by revered artists like Whistler, Eakins and Sargent.
You keep an eye peeled for the efforts of first-rate painters like John F. Peto, Martin Johnson Heade and Albert Pinkham Ryder. And the proceedings might also be livened up by George Caleb Bingham, George Catlin, Charles Willson Peale and Ralph Earl.
The appealing awkwardness often found in the images of the last four painters hints at the art that tends to be missing from these accounts, or is at best relegated to the margins: the rich tradition of American naïve painting that flourished during the late 18th and 19th centuries, mostly in the northeastern region of the young United States. Examples include the portraits of Ammi Phillips, the seascapes of Thomas Chambers and the docile beasts of Edward Hicks, to name but a few. Without the work of its great so-called naïves, only half of the history of American painting is being told, and it may be the less interesting half....
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You know the drill: it reaches from John Singleton Copley and colonial portraitists to the Ashcan School. In between come Hudson River, Luminist, genre and trompe l’oeil paintings and works by revered artists like Whistler, Eakins and Sargent.
You keep an eye peeled for the efforts of first-rate painters like John F. Peto, Martin Johnson Heade and Albert Pinkham Ryder. And the proceedings might also be livened up by George Caleb Bingham, George Catlin, Charles Willson Peale and Ralph Earl.
The appealing awkwardness often found in the images of the last four painters hints at the art that tends to be missing from these accounts, or is at best relegated to the margins: the rich tradition of American naïve painting that flourished during the late 18th and 19th centuries, mostly in the northeastern region of the young United States. Examples include the portraits of Ammi Phillips, the seascapes of Thomas Chambers and the docile beasts of Edward Hicks, to name but a few. Without the work of its great so-called naïves, only half of the history of American painting is being told, and it may be the less interesting half....