The Sun in Art Visual Essay

The Sun in Art Visual Essay

1
Sunset
Andy Warhol (1928-1987) American
Screenprint in a unique color combination
on wove paper, 34" x 34" (w x h), 1972
Sotheby's 2022 auction sold, $119,700 USD

Source Sotheby's general research edited:
Produced in 1972; this screenprint impression is number 43 from the total edition of 632 unique impressions, one of 472 impressions used by architects Johnson & Burgee for the Hotel Marquette, Minneapolis, with the Hotel Marquette Prints ink stamp on the verso, published by David Whitney. In addition to his many variations in color screenprints of Sunset in 1972, Warhol also did many variations in color screenprints of Mao.

2
This
Kenneth Noland (1924-2010) American
Oil on canvas, circa 1958-1959

Sources Wiki and Yares Art edited:
Kenneth Noland was born in 1924 at Asheville, North Carolina. In his early teens, he visited Washington D.C. with his father, and was awed by the astonishing holdings of the National Gallery of Art, inspiring his pursuit to paint. In the early 1950s he met Morris Louis in D.C. while teaching night classes. He became friends with Moris Louis, and after being introduced via Clement Greenberg to Helen Frankenthaler and seeing her new paintings at her studio in New York City in 1953, both Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis adopted her soak-stain technique of allowing thinned paint to soak into unprimed canvases.
        Noland's large-scale Circle canvases, such as This (circa 1958-59), caused a stir when he first introduced them to the art world in the early 1960s. Noland revisited the circle motif in the late 1990s, producing a series of relatively intimate hard-edge compositions with vibrant concentric circles, and heightened color relationships, often employing iridescent hues. This painting, titled This, was exhibited in 2017 at the Musee des beaux-arts de Montreal - Montreal, Canada.
        Noland died at his home in Port Clyde, Maine, in 2010 at the age of 85 with his fourth wife of sixteen years, Paige Rense, on her fourth marriage, too.

3
Coucher de soleil bronze-violet /
Sunset in Bronze-Purple
Felix Vallotton (1865-1925) Swiss
Oil on canvas, 29" x 21" (w x h), 1911

Sources Historia Arte and Flashbak and HAL open Science edited:
Felix Edouard Vallotton (1865-1925) was a Swiss painter, printmaker, a novelist, a playwright, a restorer of paintings and an art critic. As an artist he's associated with Pierre Bonnard, Jean-Edouard Vuillard and their Paris-based Les Nabis art group. Les Nabis (Hebrew for The Prophets) were inspired by the decorative, post-Impressionist, bold, flat style of Paul Gauguin and the simple clarity of Japanese woodblock prints. At some point Valloton was dubbed "the singular Felix Vallotton" by Thadee Natanson, co-founder of the avant-garde cultural journal La Revue blanche, for which the artist created stylish woodcuts and graphics, often satirizing the fashion-conscious Parisienne and the city's street life. Felix Vallotton wrote an autobiographical novel, The Murderous Life (La Vie bleue), written between 1907 and 1908 and published posthumously in 1927. His protagonist, an art historian, is an antisocial killer in love who probably gawked at sunsets as sublime as this one.

4
Sunset: Lake Wesserunsett I
Alex Katz (1927- ) American
Screenprint, edition of 60, 40"x 36" (w x h), 1972
Printed by Chiron Press Inc.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

Source Wiki edited:
Lake Wesserunsett is in Madison, Maine. In 1901, Lakewood Summer Theatre opened in East Madison on the western side of Lake Wesserunsett. Since 1967 it has been the official summer theatre of Maine, and the oldest continually operating summer theatre in America. Every year from early June to mid-September, Alex Katz moves from his SoHo loft to a 19th-century clapboard farmhouse in Lincolnville, Maine. A summer resident of Lincolnville since 1954, he has developed a close relationship with Maine's Colby College.
        In 1965, Katz embarked on a prolific career in printmaking. This was made in 1972, seven years into this. Katz would produce many editions in lithography, etching, silkscreen, woodcut and linoleum cut. He produced over 400 print editions in his lifetime. The Albertina, Vienna, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, hold complete collections of Katz' print works. Katz's work is in the collections of over 100 public institutions worldwide.

5
Sunrise over Water (Study)
Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997), American
Acrylic and graphite pencil on plastic mounted on paper,
7" x 5" (w x h), circa 1981
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

Source Wiki edited:
Roy Lichtenstein, a noted American pop artist, produced precise compositions that documented while they parodied, often in a tongue-in-cheek style with exaggerated dots and lines seen in comics. His work was influenced by popular advertising and the comic book style.
        An oil painting of a sunrise sold for $16,405,000 USD. This study for Sunrise over Water is a simple small acrylic sketch, unlike his precise finished works. His most expensive painting is Masterpiece, which was sold for $165,000,000 USD in 2017.

6
Sun Sets, Sand Brightens, Sky Opens the Other Way
Liu Kuo-sung (1932- ), Taiwanese
Horizontal scroll, ink and color on paper,
91" x 58" (w x h), 1969
Art Museum of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Source Wiki and museum notes edited:
Liu Kuo-sung (Liu Guosong), born in China in 1932 is renowned for his landscape paintings that pioneered a new approach to traditional Chinese ink wash painting. A cofounder of Taiwan's Fifth Moon Group, which drew on Western Modernist trends to revolutionize Chinese art, Liu rose to prominence after graduating from the National Taiwan Normal University. His Space series of celestial bodies, influenced by iconic Earth photographs captured by the Apollo 8 space mission, are among his most coveted works, with some selling for more than $128,000 USD. Liu's meditative canvases reflect a distinct engagement with paper that involves collage, tearing, and marbling, techniques that harmonize unusual textures with his fluid brushwork. His work is exhibited in more than 70 museums around the world, including the British Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Palace Museum, Beijing. He is also a writer on contemporary Chinese art.

7
Sun on the Lake
Arthur Garfield Dove
Oil, wax, and resin on canvas, 36" x 22" (w x h), 1938
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts

Museum notes edited:
Painted at Seneca Lake, New York in 1938, after living and working for a number of years in the artistic centers of New York and Paris, Dove returned to his childhood home of Geneva, New York. He found inspiration in the landscape around him, focusing particularly on the relationship between air, water, and light. Dove sought out formal and color relationships and his compositions often bordered on the completely abstract. However, in Sun on the Lake his subject is simplified but recognizable.
        Dove painted Sun on the Lake in the last year he lived in Geneva, New York, 1938. At this time, Dove based many of his compositions on small watercolors which he sketched out of doors. One, also called Sun on the Lake and also made in 1938, was likely used as a study for this oil. The images are closely related, but Dove used to advantage the qualities of each medium: in the watercolor, the white of the paper evokes the sun's rays dancing on the water's surface, whereas in the painting, Dove employed lighter blues to suggest light on the lake. See Dove's 9" x 6" (w x h) Gouache study for Sun on the Lake at the Boston MFA HERE.

8
Sun Setting, Denmark
William H. Johnson (1901-1970) American
Oil on burlap,25" x 21" (w x h), circa 1930
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Museum notes edited:
The swirling colors and blocky brushstrokes of Sun Setting recall the work of Vincent van Gogh, one of William H. Johnson's favorite painters. Johnson often viewed the scenes he wanted to paint through a concave fish lens that distorted the terrain into unnatural shapes and wobbly horizons. He used this optical effect as a starting point, and painted the countryside so that the land expressed the resilience and strength of Denmark's people.
        William H. Johnson (1901-1970) is considered a major American artist. Born in South Carolina to a poor African-American family, Johnson moved to New York at age seventeen. He produced hundreds of works in an eclectic career that spanned several decades as well as several continents. Although Johnson enjoyed a degree of success as an artist in the US and abroad, financial security remained elusive. It was not until very recently that his work received the attention it deserves. After his death, his entire life's work was almost disposed of to save storage fees, but it was rescued by friends at the last moment. Over a thousand paintings by Johnson are now part of the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.