Everett Shinn: A Multi-Talented American

Armor of Infante Luis, Prince of Asturias - 1712 - Signature probably refers to Jean Drouart (French) - Steel, gold, brass, silk, cotton, metallic yarn, paper - H. 28 in. (71.1 cm) - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New YorkEverett Shinn (1876-1953) became one of a group of artists known as The Eight, the foundation of the Ashcan School (formally known as The New York Realists). You can read more about the movement and its practitioners here on What About Art?

“Catching the drama of news events with speed and accuracy, Everett Shinn began his career as an artist-reporter for a Philadelphia newspaper in the early 1890s. Born in Woodstown, New Jersey, Shinn became a successful illustrator and one of the new realist painters who, at the turn of the century, looked to the modern urban world for their subjects.” (National Gallery of Art)

J. Francis Murphy: Tonalism

J. Francis Murphy - Landscape - ca. 1880-1890, oil on canvas, 5 1/2 x 12 in. (14.0 x 30.5 cm.) - Smithsonian American Art - Washington, D.C. (click photo for larger image) J. Francis Murphy (1853-1921) was an American painter born in Oswego, New York. John would become a leading figure in American Tonalism in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Tonalism is a style of painting in which landscapes are depicted in soft light and shadows, often as if through a colored or misty veil. Imported to the U.S. by American painters inspired by landscapes produced by the Barbizon School, it was a forerunner to the many schools and colonies of American Impressionism that dominated in American art  in the first part of the 20th century. The most influential American practitioners of the style were George Inness and James McNeill Whistler. You can read about both artists here on What About Art? 

Tonalism's soft-edged realism also had an influence on the photography of the early 20th century, particularly on Alfred Stieglitz and his circle.

After moving to Chicago in 1868, J. Francis Murphy began working as a painter of theater sets and advertising billboards, sparking his artistic interests. Primarily self-taught, he did attend classes at the Chicago Academy of Design for a short time. In 1873, he was elected an Associate of the Chicago Academy of Design before progressing to Academician just a mere few weeks later. Initially attracted to the Hudson River School and the works of William Hurt, Murphy spent three months in the Adirondack Mountains sketching that same year.

William Henry Johnson: Powerful “Primitivism”

William Henry Johnson - Training for War - Pochoir on paper - 11 1/2 x 16 1/2 inches - c. 1942 - The Johnson Collection - Spartanburg, South Carolina (click photo for larger image)The Harlem Renaissance was a blossoming (c. 1918–37) of African American culture, particularly in the creative arts, and was also the most influential movement in African American literary history. 

William Henry Johnson (1901-1970) was a Black American painter, Born in Florence, South Carolina. He became a student at the National Academy of Design in New York City, working with Charles Webster Hawthorne. He later lived and worked in France, where he was exposed to modernism. His tyle evolved from realism to expressionism to a powerful “primitive” style, such as seen in the work featured here. It is for this approach that he is best known. “Drawing on African American culture and history, as well as African lore, he executed several series of paintings that featured religious subjects, political themes, the black experience in the rural South and the modern military. Johnson avowed that, ‘my aim is to express in a natural way what I feel, what is in me, both rhythmically and spiritually, all that which in time has been saved up in my family of primitiveness and tradition, and which is now concentrated in me.’”

Tragedy struck in 1942 when Johnson’s studio burned down; two years later, his beloved wife died of cancer. Grief-stricken and living in Scandinavia, Johnson began to suffer mental breakdowns. Following a collapse in Oslo, he was eventually escorted by emissaries from the United States consulate to a New York mental hospital where he spent the last twenty-three years of his life.

Chuck Close: The Grid

Chuck Close - Lucas I - 1986-87 - Oil and graphite on canvas - 100 x 84 in. (254 x 213.4 cm) - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New YorkThe earlier works of Photo-Realist associated with American Photo-Realist Chuck Close (born 1940) are minutely detailed portrait heads he painted on a monumental scale in black, white, and gray. These works, factually rendered, magnified every pore and imperfection to unexpected and unnatural proportions.

Paintings such as “Lucas I" (featured here) depicts fellow artist Lucas Samaras, and are representative of Close's later, more colorful and painterly style. They go beyond the hyper-reality of his earlier portraits and elaborate on his pictorial investigation of the act of perception, breaking down the visual information into component parts that describe the actual process of seeing, not just the end result.” (MetMuseum)

“Photorealist painting of the 1970s celebrated the glossy, mirror-like "look" of the photograph, but after achieving that ideal, Close swiftly turned to portraiture, suggesting it as a means for exploring unsettling aspects of how self identity is always a composite and highly constructed, if not ultimately conflicted fiction.” (The Art Story)

My own appreciation for Close’s work lies in his reliance on (and appreciation of) the grid, as a fundamental tool of art-making, and a means for indepth artistic examination and expression.

Alex Katz: Crisp And Monumental

Alex Katz - Red Coat - 1982 - Oil on canvas - 96 × 48 in. (243.8 × 121.9 cm) - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (click photo for larger image)“Alex Katz, the 92-year-old artist known for a distinctive style of stark figurative painting and stylized landscapes he has refined since early studies dating back to the 1940s, will be the subject of a career retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in 2022.” (ARTnews)

During his long career, American artist Alex Katz (born 1927) has been associated with (and influenced by) a number of movements (such as Pop Art and Super-Relism [also known as Photo-Realism]), but he has made it a point to avoid any direct association with any of them. 

Katz has said, "I can't think of anything more exciting than the surface of things. Just appearance.” His work clearly attests to this notion, and embodies the clean lines of commercial art, as well as illustration and photography. That many of his works are monumental in scale underscores his affection for the basic elements of art.

The work featured here is a portrait of the artist’s wife, Ada, who has been a favorite subject of the artist throughout his life. “The best of Katz’s portraits create a palpable tension between specific and abstract, intimate and remote, near and far.” (Met Museum). Even in works as close-up as this one, the psychology of the sitter remains and enigma.

In addition to his portraits, Katz is also well-known for his monumental landscapes, largely based on sites in Maine.