Blue in the Abstract
Visual Essay
Eight Artist's Views
4 Men, 4 Women / 1 French 7 American
1
Waterloo Bridge
Claude Monet (1840-1926) French
Pastel on paper, 1901
Private collection
Source: Wiki and Antiques & Fine Art News, edited
Waterloo Bridge was sketched by Monet in January 1901 from room 618 on the 6th floor of London's Savoy Hotel, the drawing is one of only 26 pastels of the River Thames to survive from this period. All other versions are held in museum collections.
Monet arrived in London in January 1901 and stayed as he always did at the Savoy. From his hotel he could look to the right onto Charing Cross Bridge and to the left at Waterloo Bridge. He intended to paint the Thames in oil on canvas, however his paints, brushes and canvases did not arrive, frustrating Monet. He found himself, unable to work. In despair he wrote to his wife Alice and complained his luggage was missing and he resorted to working at "many pastels" describing them as being "like exercises" preparing him for the task ahead. A week after his arrival in London his artist's materials arrived and he conceded that things had gone well; "It is thanks to my promptly made pastels that I saw what I had to do."
Waterloo Bridge is a series of 41 impressionist oil paintings of the 1807-1810 Waterloo Bridge painted by Claude Monet between 1900 and 1904. While Monet began all of the paintings in London, he completed many of them in his studio in Giverny.
2
Tent Door at Night
Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) American
Watercolor on paper, 25" x 19" (w x h), 1916
University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM
Source: Wiki edited
Georgia O'Keeffe could've painted Tent Door at Night in the summer of 1916 in Virginia or the fall of 1916 in Texas. She taught at Columbia College in Columbia, South Carolina in late 1915, where she completed a series of highly innovative charcoal abstractions based on her personal sensations. In early 1916, O'Keeffe was in New York at Teachers College, Columbia University. She mailed the charcoal drawings to a friend and former classmate at Teachers College, Anita Pollitzer, who took them to Alfred Stieglitz at his 291 gallery early in 1916. Stieglitz found them to be the "purest, finest, sincerest things that had entered 291 in a long while" and said that he would like to show them. In April that year, Stieglitz exhibited ten of her drawings at 291.
In 1912 she's taken a summer art class in 1912 at the University of Virginia from Alon Bement, who was a Columbia University Teachers College faculty member. After further course work at Columbia in early 1916 and summer teaching for Bement, she became the chair of the art department at West Texas State Normal College, in Canyon, Texas, beginning in the fall of 1916. O'Keeffe, who enjoyed sunrises and sunsets, developed a fondness for intense and nocturnal colors. Building upon a practice she began in South Carolina, O'Keeffe painted to express her most private sensations and feelings. Rather than sketching out a design before painting, she freely created designs.
O'Keeffe taught and headed the art department at West Texas State Normal College, watching over her youngest sibling, Claudia, at her mother's request. In 1917, she visited her brother, Alexis, at a military camp in Texas before he shipped out for Europe during World War I. While there, she created the painting The Flag, which expressed her anxiety and depression about the war.
3
Composition in Blue and Black
Samuel Francis (1923-1994) American
Oil on canvas, 51" x 77" (w x h), 1955
Christie's 2022 New York auction sold $13,557,500
Source: Wiki edited
Samuel Lewis Francis (1923-1994) was an American painter and printmaker, BA (1949) and MA (1950) in Art from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied botany, medicine, and psychology. Because he worked and exhibited in the United States, Europe and Asia, Sam Francis is credited with helping secure international recognition for postwar American painting. His work has been seen most often in Europe and Japan.
His art is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California, The Kunstmuseum Basel, the Idemitsu Museum of Arts, Tokyo, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Pompidou-Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris. During his lifetime his work was featured in 113 solo exhibitions in museums and galleries. Since his death in 1994 he has been the subject of over 90 solo exhibitions.
In 2013 Symphony in Blue, a 1958 watercolor and gouache on paper set the record for a Sam Francis work on paper, selling at Sotheby's for $1,145,000.00. Composition in Blue and Black is his highest priced sold painting at $13,557,500.
4
Untitled
Lynne Drexler (1928-1999) American
Oil on canvas, 32" x 23" (w x h) 1962
Monhegan Museum of Art & History, Monhegan Island, Maine
Source: Wiki edited
Lynne Mapp Drexler (1928-1999) was an American abstract and representational artist, painter and photographer who worked on Monhegan Island, Maine. Her tendency to create vibrant paintings using a free brush stroke was influenced by Hans Hofmann and the work of Henri Matisse. Her work has been honored posthumously with soaring prices and is now in the collections of Her works are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Bates College, Lewiston, Maine, Brooklyn Museum, Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine, Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York, Muscarelle Museum of Art, Williamsburg, Virginia, Museum of Modern Art, New York, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Portland Museum of Art, Maine, Prentice Hall Collection, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Provincetown, Massachusetts, Queens Museum, Queens, New York, Tamarind Print Collection, Los Angeles, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst
5
The Sea, Maine
John Marin (1870-1953) American
Watercolor and charcoal on paper, 20" x 17" (w x h), 1921
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
Source: Wiki edited
John Marin (1870-1953) was an early American modernist artist. He is known for his abstract landscapes and watercolors. Marin spent his first summer in Maine in 1914 and almost immediately the rocky coast became one of his favorite subjects. Over the rest of his life, Marin became intimately familiar with the many moods of the sea and sky in Maine. "In painting water make the hand move the way the water moves," Marin wrote in a 1933 letter to an admirer of his technique.
Marin had a retrospective show in 1936 at the Museum of Modern Art. Late in life Marin achieved tremendous prestige as an American painter, an elder statesman of American art. In 1950, he was honored by the University of Maine and Yale University with honorary degrees of Doctor of Fine Arts.
6
Dunes and Sea II
Milton Avery (1885-1965) American
Oil and charcoal on canvas, 72" x 52" (w x h), 1960
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Source: Whitney Museum of American Art edited
Dunes and Sea II was inspired by the coastal landscape of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where Milton Avery spent four successive summers, 1957-1960, staying at an artists' colony in Provincetown. Avery first produced a half-scale gouache-on-paper version of the image during the summer of 1960, and subsequently completed the oil painting in his New York City studio. To achieve the bold, luminous color and stark spatial juxtapositions that were the hallmarks of his late work, Avery applied his oil paint like watercolor, in multiple layers of thin, diluted wash; he then manipulated the paint within each shape on the canvas with the aid of a rag, which enabled him to create subtle modulations of tone. Dunes and Sea II was one of the increasingly large and reductive images, marked by a unity of form and color, linking Avery's representational style to the abstract canvases of the New York School and Color Field painters.
7
Genuine Blue
Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) American
Acrylic and marker on canvas, 7'11" x 7'7" (w x h), 1970
Christie's 2023 New York auction sold $3,317,000 USD
Source: Christie's edited
Genuine Blue was painted in 1970 in the the months after Helen Frankenthaler's return to the U.S. from Morocco. It was Frankenthaler's trip to Morocco that brought about critical new developments in her work. Helen Frankenthaler. In this painting she creates a narrow channel in the work that traverses through the immense cerulean and lapis blue canvas, inflecting it with touches of gold and green.
Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) was an American abstract expressionist painter, one of the most distinctive colorists of the 20th Century. She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American abstract painting, exhibiting her work for over six decades from the early 1950s until 2011, while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work. In 2001, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
8
Study of Blue and Green after J. M. W. Turner
Violet Oakley (1874-1961) American
Watercolor on paper on board, 10" x 7" (w x h)
Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Gift of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 2015
Source: Wiki edited
Violet Oakley (1874-1961), a Pennsylvania artist, was the first American woman to receive a public mural commission. During the first quarter of the twentieth century, she was renowned as a pathbreaker in mural decoration, a field that had been exclusively practiced by men. Oakley excelled at murals and stained glass designs that addressed themes from history and literature in Renaissance-revival styles. Oakley painted a series of 43 murals in the Pennsylvania State Capitol Building in Harrisburg for the Governors Grand Reception Room, the Senate and the Supreme Court.
She received many honors through her life including an honorary Doctorate of Laws Degree in 1948 from Drexel Institute. At the 1904 Saint Louis International Exposition, Oakley won the gold medal in illustration for her watercolors for The Story of Vashti, and the silver medal in mural decoration for her murals at All Angels' Church. In 1905, she became the first woman to receive the Gold Medal of Honor from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In 1915, Oakley was awarded the Medal of Honor in the painting category at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco for her 1912 portrait of Philadelphia poet Florence Van Leer Earle Coates as The Tragic Muse.
The Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania has an extensive collection of her art called The Violet Oakley Experience online HERE.
