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A Yellow House
Eight Artists Views Essay
Quick Quiz
Which four artists below have the
highest selling price for a painting of theirs
listed in order starting at the highest selling price?
1
Yellow House 2
Alex Katz, (1927- ), American
Oil on linen, 120" x 120" (w x h), 2001
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Gift of the artist
Source: Wiki edited
To make one of his large works, Katz paints a small oil sketch of a subject on a Masonite board. He then makes a small, detailed drawing in pencil or charcoal. Katz next blows up the drawing into a cartoon, sometimes using an overhead projector, and transfers it to an enormous canvas via pouncing, a Renaissance technique involving powdered pigment pushed through tiny perforations pricked into the cartoon to recreate the composition on the surface to be painted. Katz pre-mixes all his colors and gets his brushes ready. Then he paints the canvas, perhaps 12 feet wide by 7 feet high, or even larger, in a six or seven hour painting session.
2
Luneburg
Lyonel Feininger (1871 1956), American
Oil on canvas, 24" x 18" (w x h), circa 1950s
Saarland Museum-Saarbrucken
Saarland Cultural Heritage Foundation
Source: Wiki and Saarland Museum, edited
Lyonel Feininger initially worked as a caricaturist and comic book artist, turning to painting 36-years-old. He quickly developed a distinctive style, characterized by cubist-crystalline simplified forms, expressionism. During Feininger's brief stays in the city of Luneburg, Germany in August 1921 and August 1922, he wrote Nature Notes, what he called studies of the Luneburg cityscape, from which he later developed paintings, prints, and drawings in the 1950s. He transformed the small-town architecture he found in Luneburg into seemingly immaterial, transparent surfaces, characterized by light-dark contrasts and clearly different from realistic depictions. He was particularly interested in buildings in the style of North German Brick Gothic. He produced a large body of photographic works and created several piano compositions and fugues for organ. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1955. See his noted oil painting Jesuits III (1915) HERE.
3
The Yellow House
Edward Hopper (1882-1967), American
Watercolor on paper, 18" x 12" (w x h), 1923
Source: Wiki
Though his career advanced slowly, Hopper achieved recognition by the 1920s, with his works featured in major American museums. His paintings, many set in the serene environments of New England, convey a sense of narrative and emotional resonance, making him a pivotal figure in American Realism. The Yellow House was painting in 1923, a year before Hopper married fellow artist Josephine Nivison, who played a significant role in managing his career and modeling for many of his works.
4
The Yellow House, Lincolnville
Lois Dodd (1927- ), American
Oil on linen, 54" x 36" (w x h), 1979
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Source: Wiki
As part of the wave of New York modernists to explore the coast of Maine just after the end of the second World War, Dodd helped to change the face of painting in the state. Along with Fairfield Porter, Rackstraw Downes, Alex Katz, Charles DuBack, and Neil Welliver, Dodd began spending her summers in the Mid-Coast region surrounding Penobscot Bay. In addition to her numerous exhibitions, her work remains in the collections of many art museums, including at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Bowdoin College Art Museum, Brunswick, ME; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Cooper Hewitt Museum, New York, NY; National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.; Museo dell'Arte, Udine, Italy; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, CT; National Academy of Design, New York, NY; Kalamazoo Art Center, Kalamazoo, MC; and Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN.
5
Yellow House
Suzanne Chamlin (1963- ), American
Oil on linen, 10" x 8" (w x h), 2023
Source: Artist website
Suzanne Chamlin-Richer received her B.A., 1985, Barnard College, Columbia University, Program in the Arts, New York, NY, and her M.F.A., 1989, Painting, Yale School of Art, Yale University, New Haven, CT. She's an Associate Professor at Fairfield University, Studio Art Program, Department of Visual and Performing Arts from 2009 to the present. Her art is in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, the Nelson Atkins Museum.
Her website is HERE.
6
Door to the River
Willem de Kooning
Oil on linen, 70" x 80" (w x h), 1960
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
Source: Whitney Museum, edited
In the late 1950s, Willem de Kooning began dividing his time between New York and eastern Long Island, then a rural area. His paintings of this period, as he described them in 1960, reflect the change in his surroundings. "They're emotions, most of them. Most of them are landscapes and highways and sensations of that, outside the city - with the feeling of going to the city or coming from it." That same year he painted Door to the River, making his wide brush strokes with house painter's brushes. The broad strokes of pink, yellow, brown, and white form a door-like rectangle in the center of the canvas, beneath which lies a passage of blue, perhaps evoking the river in the title. Floating amid vibrant space, the bold opening implies a sense of majestic other-worldliness. Confidently executed, Door to the River bears neither the marks of continual reworking characteristic of de Kooning's earlier paintings nor the agitation and colorist turbulence of his later work.
7
Summer Storm
Tom Curry (1957- ) American
Oil, 30" x 36" (w x h)
(View seen from Church St., Stonington, ME)
Source: Artist website:
Tom Curry lives along Eggemoggin Reach in Brooklin, ME. He holds degrees from the University of Massachusetts and the Rhode Island School of Design. He has taught and conducted workshops at Wellesley College, Rhode Island School of Design, the Round Top Center for the Arts, the Danforth Museum School, and the Wentworth Institute. His paintings have been included in such publications as Island Journal, the Boston Globe, The New Yorker magazine, Down East, and on the cover of the book East Hope (Penguin Books, 2009). His work is in the collections of the Delaware Art Museum, the Wheaton College Art Museum, the U.S. State Department, Federal Reserve Bank, and the Boston Red Sox. His paintings are in the book, Island Paintings by Tom Curry, by Terry Tempest Williams, Carl Little, and Tom Curry, DownEast Books, The Globe Pequot Publishing Group, Lanham, MD, 80 pages, 2012. The book is on amazon HERE. The artist's website is HERE.
8
Island Farmhouse
Fairfield Porter (1907-1975), American
Oil on canvas, 79" x 80" (w x h), 1969
Private Collection
(View on his family's Island in Penobscot Bay, ME)
Source: Wiki:
While a student at Harvard in the 1920s, Porter majored in fine arts; he continued his studies at the Art Students' League when he moved to New York City in 1928. His studies at the Art Students' League predisposed him to produce socially relevant art and, although the subjects would change, he continued to produce realist work for the rest of his career. He would be criticized and revered for continuing his representational style in the midst of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Fairfield Porter was not only a painter but also a respected art critic. His painting above is also on the cover of the major book about Porter and his art: Fairfield Porter, Catalogue Raisonne of the Oil Paintings, Watercolors, and Pastels by Joan Ludman, Hudson Hills Press, New York, NY, 400 pages, 2001
Quick Quiz Answers
The four artists
with the highest selling price for a painting of theirs:
1
#6 Willem de Kooning, Interchange, painted in 1955,
$300,000,000 USD.
2
#3 Edward Hopper, Chop Suey, painted in 1929,
$91,900,000 USD.
3
#2 Lyonel Feininger, Jesuits III, painted in 1915,
$23,280,000 USD.
4
#1 Alex Katz, Blue Umbrella, painted in 1972,
$4,151,448 USD.
