Those Bright Fall Colors
A Visual Art Essay
in Five Watercolors and Three Oils
Color at these 7 Art Museums:
Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York (2)
Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, Tennessee
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York New York
Erie Art Museum, Erie Pennsylvania
Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
The Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado
This first painting is one of my top ten all-time favorite paintings. I'm always drawn back to it at the museum. It's like looking at it for the first time, so fresh, the paint looks wet, the colors bright, the air is crisp, here's familiar fall Maine woods, the deep blue high autumn sky, the movement within the frame, the composition keeping my eyes moving, the loose yet sure brushstrokes, the conversation it has with me, and it's uplifting.
Gloria October, Shin Pond, Maine
Carl Sprinchorn, (1887-1971), Swedish, American
Oil on canvas, 34" x 26" (w x h), 1946
Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine
Source: Wiki
Carl Sprinchorn made extensive visits to camps and hamlets in the North Maine Woods and the paintings and drawings he made there came to be his most celebrated works. A biographer called him a "composite of opposites," saying that he was as much at home in the New York art world with its sophisticated artists and wealthy patrons as he was in rural boarding houses and lumber camps.
Landscape
Auguste Renoir 1841-1919), French
Watercolor on off-white laid paper, 13" x 9" (w x h), 1889
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York New York
Source: MET notes
In the summer of 1889 Renoir rented a house in Aix-en-Provence from Paul Cézanne's brother-in-law. The artists were close friends for some thirty years, and the influence of the extraordinary Cézanne is strongly evoked in Renoir's work, not only in this landscape watercolor but in the many paintings made that summer in Aix.
Untitled (Landscape)
Beauford Delaney (1901-1979), American
Watercolor on paper, 23" x 15" (w x h), circa 1940
Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, Tennessee
Source: Widewalls and Wiki
Beauford Delaney was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. Harlem writer James Baldwin at 15 years-old met painter Beauford Delaney and the two kindred spirits developed a strong and lasting friendship united by similar life difficulties both had experienced. Baldwin was an ongoing witness to Delaney's evolution and was fascinated with the painter, whom he saw as a father figure, muse, and model of a dignified gay man of color. The painter produced several works portraying Baldwin or inspired by him, while the writer devoted several novels and essays to his mentor and friend. He is remembered for his work with the Harlem Renaissance in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as his later works in abstract expressionism following his move to Paris in the 1950s. Beauford's younger brother, Joseph, was also a noted painter.
Still Life
Lee Krasner (1908-1984), American
Oil on paper, 25" x 19" (w x h), 1938
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York
Source: Wiki
Lee Krasner was an abstract expressionist painter, with a specialty in collage. She was married to Jackson Pollock. Although there was much interaction between their two styles, the relationship somewhat overshadowed her contribution for some time. Krasner is now seen as a key transitional figure within abstraction, who connected early-20th-century art with the new ideas of postwar America, and her work fetches high prices at auction. She is also one of the few female artists who had a retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art.
Movement of Vaulted Chambers
Paul Klee (1879-1940), Swiss, German
Watercolor on paper mounted on cardboard, 11" x 9" (w x h), 1915
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York New York
Source: Wiki
Paul Klee was a Swiss-born German artist who explored color theory, writing about it extensively. He and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture in Germany. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.
Autumn on Presque Isle (Pennsylvania)
Wilda Sundberg (1930-2021), American
Watercolor on paper, 2017
Erie Art Museum, Erie Pennsylvania
Source: Various, Newspaper, Erie Art Museum
Presque Isle State Park, Pennsylvania includes a marina, lighthouse, Lily Pond, Pine Tree Beach, and cabins.
In 1949 Wilda received a National Scholastic Scholarship to attend the Albright Art School of the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy. In 1951 she married fellow artist Carl Sundberg and began teaching children's classes at The Art Center of Erie/Erie Art Museum from 1951 to 2017. Wilda would meet her students on Presque Isle to paint, if good weather, and if not, at the Erie Art Museum classroom. Wilda Sundberg was a founding member of the Northwest Pennsylvania Artist Association. She was a board member of the Erie Art Museum and taught watercolor classes there, always holding her classes outdoors, weather permitting, and then in the classroom at the museum. She was featured in a 2020-2021 retrospective exhibition, Wilda Sundberg: A Life in Watercolor, at the Erie Art Museum, Erie, Pennsylvania. She completed her journey through life at 91 years-old on September 9, 2021.
The Wheat Field / Champs de Ble
Maurice de Vlaminck (1876-1958), French
Oil on canvas, 32" x 26" (w x h), circa 1906
25 1/2 × 32 3/16 in. (64.77 × 81.76 cm)
Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
One of a group of artists called the Fauves, or wild beasts, Vlaminck was greatly influenced by the work of Vincent van Gogh and admired his use of thick paint applied in swirling, expressive strokes. Like Van Gogh, Vlaminck was drawn to the image of wheat fields and painted them throughout his career. In this scene, the artist used bright, clashing color applied with spontaneous brushstrokes to caption the movement of the wind-blown stalks.
Sweet Thing
Lisa Yuskavage (1962- ), American
Watercolor on paper, 22" x 30" (w x h), 1993
The Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado
The Aspen Art Museum hosts reputable shows but has no collection. This painting in the show, Wilderness, is a retrospective of fifty paintings in collaboration with the Baltimore Museum of Art.
Source: Aspen Art Museum
Lisa Yuskavage is known for her technical skill matching the old masters and her revolutionary approach to figurative painting. New York Times critic Roberta Smith called Yuskavage "the premier bad-girl painter of the naughty late 1990s." However, she's used landscape in her work since the earliest watercolor series from the 1990s.
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