Browse Items (227 total)

  • Tags: Federal Art Project

Rites - October Landscape.JPG
Although it owes something to Cézanne’s post-impressionist fields of color, Rites’ painting often de-emphasizes formal shapes that would hold together such a composition. It takes a second look to discern a house, outbuilding, and dock upon a pond or…

Reinhart - Specter of the Roses.JPG
This painting takes its name from Le Spectre de la rose, a short ballet created in 1911 by Jean-Louis Vaudoyer. In it, a young girl dreams of dancing with the spirit of a rose worn to her first ball. It was famous for the performance of legendary…

RamerNat - Woods House.JPG
Across a field we see two small buildings next to a larger one mostly obscurred by trees at left. Given their size and delapidation, it can be inferred that the lives within the homes are humble ones—perhaps agricultural workers, given the pile of…

RamerNat - The Plot Next Door.JPG
It would appear that we’re looking at a farm—barn, silo, outbuildings, a line of trees—around haying season. So why the painting’s title? The nearest lot seems to be across a road, but fence posts run across it; if so this would be an informal farm…

RamerNat - Fishkill Fields.JPG
Using a fairly flat picture plane, Ramer uses an array of muted colors to depict a rural scene in Duchess County (mountains in the background may be the Fishkill range). The composition is balanced between an aging tree at left, a windmill at right.…

PreachenWilliam - Flower Study.JPG
This vividly colorful painting has a lot going on. As with Preachen’s “Still Life on a Balcony,” space is radically discontinuous here: flowers, table covering, fields, and sky each occupy their own flat plane; the dark brown stoneware pitcher…

PreachenWilliam - Still Life on a Balcony.JPG
In its objects, archictecture, and visual style, this painting gestures back to earlier centuries of allegorical still lifes. On this side of an ornate railing, the seeming bounty is undermined by intimations of suffering (gladiolus), overconsumption…

PreachenWilliam - October Still Life.JPG
A vividly colored grouping avoids any appearance of symmetry or regularity of shape—even a painted plate isn’t circular. Likewise, mottling seems part of Preachen’s design as if to demonstrate that beauty can be irregular. Reds and oranges dominate…

PreachenWilliam - Flower Arrangement.JPG
At upper left are the flowers of this still life’s putative title, but it still doesn’t account for the majority of Preachen’s composition. Their bright orange petals activate several objects in a similar tone (fruit, a piece of fabric, a painted…

Polowetski - Central Park.JPG
Using brushstrokes and a palette resembling impressionism (verging on pointillism), Polowetski’s greens of early spring are overwhelmed by saturated shades of lavender, blue, magenta, and umber. The terrain is roughly accurate but compressed so as to…
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