Romare Bearden: A Communicator of Culture

Romare Bearden - Untitled (from "Prevalence of Ritual" portfolio), 1974 - Color lithograph on paper- 36 x 29 1/4 in. (91.5 x 74.3 cm) - The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest, Hirshhorn Museum - Washington, D.C. (click photo for larger image)Romare Bearden (1911-1988) was an American artists, whose collages of photographs and painted paper on canvas depict aspects of American black culture in a style derived from Cubism. He is considered one of the most important African American artists of the 20th century.  In "Pepper Jelly Lady" a figure in a dashingly patterned dress is framed by a wide border filled with drawings of Southern life: a plain wooden church, a porticoed mansion, a room with a potbellied stove.

Charles Burchfield: Personal Interpretations of Nature

Sunflower - Charles Burchfield - 1915 - Private collection Painting - watercolor - Height: 50.8 cm (20 in.), Width: 35.56 cm (14 in.) (click photo for larger image)Charles Burchfield (1893-1967) was an American painter known initially for his realistic watercolors of the American scene and later for his mystically poetic landscapes. By the mid-1940s, he had abandoned realism, returning to an early interest in personal interpretations of nature. His paintings convey a sense of wonder at the color, movement, and forms of nature, particularly in connection with the seasons.

Unrequited Love

Winslow Homer - Portrait of Helena de Kay - c. 1872 - oil on panel - 31 × 47 cm (12.2 × 18.5 in) - Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza - Madrid, Spain (click photo for larger image)Winslow Homer’s (1836-1910) unrequited love, Helena De Kay, is the subject of this portrait from 1871. Her rejection of Homer, who asked for her hand, left him crushed. He remained a bachelor. She was a talented painter and a founder of the Art Students League and Society of American Artists. She married the American poet and editor Richard Gilder. Gilder and de Kay were the models for the characters Thomas and Augusta Hudson in Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer-prize winning novel, Angle of Repose. Their son, Rodman de Kay Gilder (1877–1953), became an author and married Louise Comfort Tiffany, a daughter of Louis Comfort Tiffany. 

Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series - 1940-41

Jacob Lawrence - The Migration Series No. 12. “The railroad stations were at times so over-packed with people leaving that special guards had to be called in to keep order.” - 1941 - casein tempera on hardboard - 12 x 18 in. - The Museum of Modern Art, New York.A sixty-panel series known as the Migration Series is shared between MoMA and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. Artist Jacob Lawrence took as his subject the exodus of African Americans from the rural South to Northern cities during and after World War I, when industry's demand for workers attracted them in vast numbers. As the son of migrants, Lawrence had a personal connection to the topic. He researched the subject extensively and wrote the narrative before making the paintings, taking seriously the dual roles of educator and artist.

Lawrence was influenced by the work of the Mexican muralists and earlier artists such as Goya, but he drew his stylistic inspiration primarily from the Harlem community in which he lived. The vivid pattern and color—created in tempera paint as Lawrence worked on all the panels at once—reflect an aesthetic that itself had migrated from the South.

An American Original

William Merritt Chase - Woman in White, 1910, oil on canvas, Indianapolis Museum of Art (click photo for larger image)American painter William Merritt Chase (1849-1916) settled in New York in 1878, after five years studying in Munich. He became the most important American teacher of his generation—teaching at the Art Students' League of New York and then at his own Chase School of Art, founded in 1896. The vigorous handling and fresh color characteristic of much of the best American painting of the early 20th century owes a good deal to his example. His pupils (whom he encouraged to paint in the open air) included Charles Demuth and Georgia O’Keefe. Chase was a prolific artist, with an output of more than 2000 paintings that include still lifes, portraits, interiors, and landscapes. Chase is also defined as an American Impressionist. That movement was inspired by earlier French Impressionism, but was much more structured and deliberate.