- My Backyardby Georgia O’Keeffe1943
- Christmas Morning, Breakfastby Horace Pippin1945
- Skyscraper Bookcasesby Paul Theodore Frankl1920s
- The Old Folks (Mother and Father)by John Steuart Curry1929
- Daughters of Revolutionby Grant Wood1932
- Public Grain Elevator in New Orleansby Ralston Crawford1938
My Backyard,
By Georgia O’Keeffe | –
Museum Purchase: The Edwin and Virginia Irwin Memorial, Fanny Bryce Lehmer Endowment, Bequest of Mr. and Mrs. Walter J. Wichgar, John J. Emery Endowment, Mr. and Mrs. Harry S. Leyman Endowment, and Rieveschl Collection Fund, 2013.51
"I have but one desire as a painter—that is to paint what I see, as I see it, in my own way, without regard for the desires or taste of the professional dealer or the professional collector." –Georgia O’Keeffe
Georgia O’Keeffe is known for her vibrant paintings of flowers and her depictions of the southwestern United States. She was born in Wisconsin in 1887 and moved to Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1902. When O’Keeffe started taking private lessons at age twelve she knew she was going to be an artist. In high school she even designed and sewed her own garments. In 1907, after O’Keeffe had finished her schooling, she moved to New York City, where she joined the Art Students League, then to Chicago to draw advertisements as a commercial illustrator. O’Keeffe then moved back to Virginia to be with her family and enrolled in University of Virginia. Between 1915 and 1918, O’Keeffe looked for her artistic voice by experimenting with charcoal, watercolors, and abstract shapes. Inspired by the rugged landscape of the Southwest, she moved to Canyon, Texas, to work and teach.
In 1916, a well-known photographer and gallery owner named Alfred Stieglitz took interest in O’Keeffe’s work, and invited her to come back to New York City in 1918. She and Stieglitz married in 1924 and at their summer home in Lake George, New York, she began to paint her signature flowers and landscapes. She still had a desire to be in the Southwest, so she spent time in an artist community in Taos, New Mexico, and explored other parts of the state. The earthy landscapes there influenced her work over the next forty years, including this painting. While in New Mexico, she started collecting skulls and bones to take back to New York City; attracted to their organic shapes, she was also interested in their associations with life and death and thought there was something American about painting bones.
O’Keeffe loved the landscape of New Mexico so much that she bought a house sixty miles northwest of Santa Fe at Ghost Ranch in 1940 and another in the village of Abiquiu in 1945. In 1949, after Stieglitz died, New Mexico became her permanent home and she lived at either Abiquiu or Ghost Ranch until 1984. In New Mexico, she used the simple architecture, bones, and her surrounding landscape as subjects for her works of art. O’Keeffe created more than 2,000 works of art throughout her lifetime. She moved to Santa Fe in 1984, and died two years later at the age of 98.
Christmas Morning, Breakfast,
By Horace Pippin | –
The Edwin and Virginia Irwin Memorial, 1959.47
Horace Pippin was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1888. Shortly after his birth, his family moved to Goshen, New York, where Pippin grew up. He left school after the eighth grade and began to work on a local farm to help support his family. Pippin’s other early jobs included working as a hotel porter, a mover at a storage company, and as an ironworker.
From 1917–18, during the height of World War I, Pippin served with the United States Army’s 369th Infantry Regiment. In 1918, Pippin was shot in his right arm. The injury left him unable to raise his arm to shoulder height. He received an honorable discharge and was given a disability pension. In addition, he was awarded a croix de guerre by the French government.
After settling back in Pennsylvania, Pippin soon married and began to work at various odd jobs to supplement the income he received from his disability pension. He also began to undergo various forms of physical therapy to regain the use of his right arm. To try to increase his range of motion, Pippin began to decorate wooden cigar boxes. Although Pippin had kept a sketchbook with him while he was fighting overseas, his first paintings were not created until the late 1920s.
Although Pippin never received any formal training in art, his paintings gained the admiration of the art world for his natural sense of design and their emotional expressiveness. His work was discovered by Christian Brinton, an art critic, who encouraged Pippin to participate in an exhibition at the Chester County Art Association. Two of Pippin’s works were included, and they were viewed by another local artist, N. C. Wyeth. Soon after, Wyeth and Brinton arranged for Pippin to have a solo exhibition at the West Chester Community Center. Pippin’s work was soon noticed in New York City, and, in 1938, four of his paintings appeared in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.
Pippin’s career as a professional artist grew through the early 1940s. His work was exhibited in numerous galleries and museums throughout the country, and he received many awards and prizes. Additionally, his works were reproduced in Time, Life, Vogue, and Newsweek. His noteworthy career was cut short by his death in 1946 of a stroke.
Skyscraper Bookcases,
By Paul Theodore Frankl | –
Gift of the Estate of Mrs. James M. Hutton II, 1969.417-418
A pioneer of modern design, Paul Theodore Frankl was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1886. From a young age, Frankl excelled in drawing and gymnastics. Although his father had hoped he would pursue a career in the family real-estate business, Frankl ultimately trained as an architect in Vienna and Berlin.
In 1914, on the eve of World War I, Frankl travelled to America and Japan. When the war erupted, Frankl, like many others, believed the conflict would be brief. He decided to wait it out in New York. Little did he know that he would remain in America for the rest of his life and become a leading figure in the country’s modern design movement.
Frankl began his career in America by selling Japanese screens, scrolls, and other wares which he admired for their “refinement” and “dignity.” The “distilled essence of beauty” he found in the arts of Japan would have a lasting impact on his own ideas and approaches to modern design. Eventually, Frankl offered his own design services for hire and began to create modern, streamlined furniture in the Art Deco style.
Frankl’s career took off during the 1920s. In 1921, he opened a small second-floor gallery at 4 East 48th Street, just around the corner from prestigious Fifth Avenue. There, he continued to sell his designs for modern furniture alongside modern textiles and wallpapers imported from Europe and Japan. Shortly thereafter he moved into the larger ground-floor showroom of the building, greatly increasing his gallery’s visibility. Then, in 1925, while summering in Woodstock, New York, Frankl created his now famous “skyscraper” style furniture. Requiring storage for the large art books and portfolios in his small cabin, Frankl created a system of bookcases that both fit his need and explored the clean lines and simplicity of modern design. The term “skyscraper” came from the furniture’s resemblance to the stepped-back skyscrapers being built in New York City. Through his furniture designs and his numerous lectures and publications on the importance of a fresh, modern approach to design, Frankl quickly became a highly regarded leader in the American modern movement.
Financially affected by the Great Depression of the early 1930s, Frankl closed his New York store and moved to Los Angeles in 1934. There, he opened a new shop on Wilshire Boulevard, along “Miracle Mile.” His showroom rented for less than a tenth of his costs in New York and was five times the size. There, he sold his designs, imported accessories and services to the Hollywood elite, collaborated with a number of Southern California architects, and increased his own furniture-design output, eventually working with furniture manufactures to mass-produce his designs. Frankl continued to design and travel up until his death at age seventy-two in 1958 in Palos Verde, California.
The Old Folks (Mother and Father),
By John Steuart Curry | –
The Edwin and Virginia Irwin Memorial, 2002.46
John Steuart Curry, the oldest of five children, was born November 14, 1897, on a farm near Dunavant, Kansas, to Smith and Margaret Curry. From a young age, Curry drew animals around the farm and had his first art lesson at twelve years old. In 1916 Curry entered the Kansas City Art Institute, transferring to the Art Institute of Chicago after only a month. In 1918 he attended Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania.
Following graduation, Curry began his career as a freelance illustrator in Leonia, New Jersey. In the early 1920s, Curry's illustrations were widely published in magazines like Boy's Life, Country Gentleman, and the Saturday Evening Post. In 1923 he married Clara Derrick and lived in Greenwich Village, New York. In 1924 they moved to Westport, Connecticut, where he lived until 1936. In 1926 Curry went to Paris to study the European masters and admired, among others, the works of Gustave Courbet, Honoré Daumier, Titian, and Peter Paul Rubens.
Encouraged by success in exhibitions and sales, Curry's career moved from illustration to painting during the late 1920s with the support of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, who gave him a stipend. In 1936, Curry was appointed artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin College of Agriculture as part of an art program. The purpose of his residency was to serve as an educational resource for rural people of the state. In return for his work, he was given a salary and a studio on campus and the freedom to execute his own work as he chose.
As part of the Federal Art Program, Curry completed two murals in the Justice Department building in Washington, D.C., in 1936 and two murals in the Department of the Interior building in 1938. From 1938 to 1940, he worked on murals for the state-house rotunda in Topeka, Kansas. Curry's book illustrations were also in high demand, and he contributed art to novels such as My Friend Flicka and to editions of Lincoln's and Emerson's writings. Curry died in 1946 of heart failure.
Daughters of Revolution,
By Grant Wood | –
The Edwin and Virginia Irwin Memorial, 1959.46
Grant Wood was born on February 13, 1891—the son of a farmer father and teacher mother. Shortly after the death of his father in 1901, the family moved to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Wood’s home for the rest of his life. Wood’s move from the country to the city brought him great opportunities, and both his early years on the farm and his new urban experiences were important to the art he would make as an adult. In Cedar Rapids, he was able to pursue art studies. On the night of his high school graduation in 1910, Wood boarded a train for Minneapolis, where he enrolled in a summer course at the Minneapolis School of Design and Handicraft.
Wood referred to the period of his life from 1910 to the early 1920s as his “bohemian years.” During this time he moved to Chicago to attend the Art Institute, worked as a silversmith, served in the Army as a camouflage painter, taught art in the Cedar Rapids public schools, and attended the Académie Julian in Paris. The 1920s also brought Wood numerous local patrons. Once the city’s local businessmen saw his talent, they encouraged the young artist to pursue his gift. Determined to help him make his living, these men commissioned from Wood portraits, landscapes, and even interior decorations.
After many years painting in styles derived from Europe, Wood decided in the late 1920s that for America to take pride in its heritage and identity, its artists should paint in a style that an average American could understand. Encouraged by writers in Cedar Rapids, he took up Iowa themes and moved gradually toward a style of tight brushwork and detailed imagery. American Gothic of 1930 (now at the Art Institute of Chicago), his most famous painting, has come to represent the movement known as Regionalism for its emphasis on the local. The term Regionalism is particularly associated with images of rural and small-town America. Wood began a new series of works that represented and sometimes glorified Midwestern life and its people—scenes with which the public could identify. Much to his own surprise, American Gothic brought him instant national success and he became known as the chief philosopher and greatest teacher of Regionalist ideals.
In the early 1930s, a period encompassed by the Great Depression, critics and the public embraced his regional ideals. However, many Americans of the late 1930s and early 1940s, with the threat of war and European Fascism, saw his work as insular in the face of world events. Interest in Wood’s Regionalist style began to wane. Disagreements with his colleagues at the University of Iowa over curriculum issues also tarnished Wood’s influence and reputation. To escape the stress of these disagreements, he took a leave of absence from the school in 1941. Grant Wood died of cancer on February 12, 1942, a day before his fifty-first birthday.
Public Grain Elevator in New Orleans,
By Ralston Crawford | –
Gift of Emil Frank, 1962.738
Ralston Crawford was born in 1906 in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, the only son of a ship captain. In 1910, the family moved to Buffalo, New York. In Buffalo, Crawford attended Lafayette High School from 1920–26. There he demonstrated a talent for the arts, winning several poster contests and staying an extra two years at the school for post-graduate work in the art department.
In 1926, Crawford moved to New York City to study art at the Pratt Institute. Instead, the young artist found work on a fruit company boat bound for South America. From 1926–27 Crawford worked as a sailor on steamships to Central America, California, New Orleans, and the Caribbean before studying at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1927. After two years in Los Angeles, he returned to the east coast to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In 1932, Crawford moved to Paris where he enrolled first at the Academia Colarossi then in 1933 at the Academie Scandinave. He completed his academic study at Columbia University. Crawford had his first one-person exhibition in 1934 at the Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore.
Crawford’s work throughout the 1930s and 1940s was aligned with fellow American Precisionist artists Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler. Crawford applied the exact, sharply-defined technique of the Precisionists to capture the skyscrapers, bridges, and factories going up around him. The museum’s Public Grain Elevator in New Orleans, painted in 1938, is an example of this precise work. After a series of teaching positions, Crawford joined the military in 1943. He served in the Weather Division of the U.S. Air Force, designing charts to make weather data clearer to pilots. In 1946, he was sent by Fortune magazine to witness and paint the atomic-bomb testing at Bikini Atoll.
From the 1940s through the 1960s, Crawford dedicated considerable time to teaching. He taught at the Art Academy of Cincinnati from 1941–42 and again in 1949. From February 16 to March 15 of that year, the Cincinnati Art Museum exhibited Crawford, Cutler, showcasing paintings by Crawford and sculpture by Charles Fordon Cutler. His work as an educator also included stints at the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, the Brooklyn Museum School, and The New School for Social Research in New York City. In 1950, Crawford returned to New Orleans, which he had visited repeatedly in the 1920s and 1930s. While in the Crescent City, he began several important series, including paintings, drawings, and photographs that captured the unique traditions and architecture of the city.
While best known for his Precisionist paintings, Crawford was also a talented photographer. He completed several series of photographs of life in New Orleans as well as other locations during his extensive travels. He photographed industrial subjects including dams and ships, many of which he used as the basis for later paintings. According to his wishes, he was buried in New Orleans when he died in 1978; the funeral was accompanied by a full brass band.