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Loretta Quinn
Bronze sculpture on granite plinth, 1993
Cnr Swanston St & Flinders La (Melway ref. 2F, G5)
Born in Hobart, Loretta Quinn studied sculpture at the Tasmanian School of Art and the Victorian College of the Arts. The City of Melbourne commissioned Quinn to create Beyond the Ocean of Existence as part of the Swanston Walk redevelopment in 1992; the sculpture was unveiled the following year. The city also commissioned Quinn’s Within Three Worlds, located in Princes Park.
Beyond the Ocean of Existence demonstrates Quinn’s reflective approach, and it is a work replete with religious references. There is a sense of ‘folk religion’ in much of her art, and whether the symbols derive from the mystery of a Latin mass or the animist universe, a Celtic myth or a Japanese garden, she says they are ‘visual references to which others will relate’.
A patinated bronze sculpture, Beyond the Ocean of Existence comprises a single large ball surrounded by eight bronze coils. A series of smaller balls and lengths of column, both triangular and circular in cross-section, surmount these coils. At the sculpture’s top is a stylised angel. The work is a mounted on a granite plinth of dressed and polished blocks.
Photograph by Louis Porter
This wildcat is the precious existence that only Iriomote-jima Island inhabits. It is said less than 100. It is appointed to a natural monument of a country.
A characteristic：
Size as for the house cat. A point of an ear is round. There is a tiger ear-shaped spot (a spot of a white obi) behind an ear. Its tail is big and is long. They are not afraid of water and can swim, and underwater bait can capture it.
This is the solid which fitted a traffic accident.
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow...
(t.s. eliot: the hollow men)
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Skinner is more than just an artist who paints psychodellic images of metal band mayhem, he is an event, a personality, a one-stop-shop of the super rad. It is within this personality that we begin to understand Skinner's work, and the detail, time, and focus he puts into everything he produces. We sat down with the artist to talk about his new show at The Shooting Gallery entitled "The Fragile Art of Existence" which explores a new place in the Skinner's body of work.
Read the full interview on Warholian here: www.warholian.com/2011/08/11/skinner-fragile-existence/
Studio photos by Hal Rotter
Opening Night Photos by Michael Cuffe
Still in existence are two platform mounds ca AD 1500. Between 1799-1814, a fort existed here named after George Washington's secretary of state, James Pickering. When the city fell to the Union army during the Civil War, another Fort Pickering was constructed in this area. At this time, one of the platform mounds was hollowed out, and served as a munitions bunker. At one section of the area, a marine hospital was constructed and opened in 1884. Originally, the hospital consisted of six buildings: a stable, a surgeon's house, an executive building, two wards, and a nurses' building. During the 1930s, several new WPA buildings were added to the site. In order to make room for the new buildings, several building were torn down and the executive and nurses' building were saved and moved three hundred feet from their original site.
Baku is the capital of Azerbaijan Republic, which was also the capital of Shirvan (during the reigns of Akhsitan I and Khalilullah I), Baku Khanate, Azerbaijan Democratic Republic and Azerbaijan SSR and the administrative center of Russian Baku governorate. Baku is derived from the old Persian Bagavan, which translates to "City of God". A folk etymology explains the name Baku as derived from the Persian Bādkube (بادکوبه ), meaning "city where the wind blows", due to frequent winds blowing in Baku. However, the word Bādkube was invented only in the 16th or 17th century, whereas Baku was founded at least before the 5th century AD.
Starting from the 13th century AD the name of Baku begins to appear in mediaeval European Sources. Spelling of the name varies from Vahcüh (Pietro Della Valle), to Bakhow, Baca, Bakuie and Backu.
On the coins minted by Shirvanshahs name appears as Bakuya.
Various different hypotheses have been proposed to explain the etymology of the word Baku. According to L.G.Lopatinski[3] and Ali Huseynzade "Baku" is derived from Turkic word for "hill". K.P. Patkanov, a specialist in Caucasian history, also explains the name as "hill" but in Lak language.
Around 1000 years ago, the territory of modern Baku and Absheron was savanna with rich flora and fauna. Traces of human settlement go back to the Stone Age. From the Bronze Age there have been rock carvings discovered near Bayil, and a bronze figure of a small fish discovered in the territory of the Old City. This have led some to suggest the existence of a Bronze Age settlement within the city's territory. Near Nardaran in a place called Umid Gaya, a prehistoric observatory was discovered, where on the rock the images of sun and various constellations are carved together with a primitive astronomic table. Further archeological excavations revealed various prehistoric settlements, native temples, statues and other artifacts within the territory of the modern city and around it.
In the 1st century, Romans organized two Caucasian campaigns and reached Baku. Near Baku, in Gobustan, Roman inscriptions dating from 84–96 AD were discovered. The remnant of this period is the village of Ramana in the Sabunchu district of Baku.
In the Life of the Apostle Bartholomew, Baku is identified as Armenian albanus. Some historians assume that during the existence of Caucasian Albania Baku was called Albanopolis. Local church traditions record the belief that Bartholomew's martyrdom occurred at the bottom of the Maiden Tower within the Old City, where according to historical data, a Christian church was built on the site of the pagan temple of Arta.
A record from the 5th-century historian Priscus of Panium was the first to mention the famous Bakuvian fires (ex petra maritima flamma ardet – from the maritime stone flame emerges). Owing to these eternal fires Baku became a major center of ancient Zoroastrianism. Sassanid shah Ardashir I gave orders "to keep an inextinguishable fire of the god Ormazd" in the city temples.
There is little or no information regarding Baku in medieval sources until the 10th century. The earliest numismatic evidence found in the city is an Abbasid coin dating from the 8th century AD. At that time Baku was a domain of the Arab Caliphate and later of Shirvanshahs. During this period, they frequently came under assault of the Khazars and (starting from the 10th century) the Rus. Shirvanshah Akhsitan I built a navy in Baku and successfully repelled another Rus assault in 1170. After a devastating earthquake struck Shamakhy, the capital of Shirvan, Shirvanshah's court moved to Baku in 1191. A mint was put into operation.
Between the 12th and 14th centuries, a massive fortification was undertaken in the city and around it. The Maiden Tower, castles of Ramana, Nardaran, Shagan and Mardakan, and also famous Sabayel castle on the island of the Baku bay was built during this period. The city walls were also rebuilt and strengthened.
The biggest problem of Baku during this time was the transgression of the Caspian Sea. The rising levels of the water from time to time engulfed much of the city and the famous castle of Sabayel went completely into the sea in the 14th century. These led to several legends about submerged cities such as Shahriyunan ("Greek city").
Hulagu Khan occupied Baku under the domain of the Shirvan state during the third Mongol campaign in Azerbaijan (1231–1239) and it became a winter residence for Ilkhanids. In the 14th century, the city prospered under Muhammad Oljeitu who relieved it from some of the heavy taxes. Bakuvian poet Nasir Bakui wrote a panegyric to Oljeitu thus creating the first piece of poetry in Azerbaijani language.
Marco Polo had written of Baku oil exports to Near Eastern countries. The city also traded with the Golden Horde, the Moscow Princedom, and European countries.
In 1501, Safavid shah Ismail I laid siege to Baku. The besieged inhabitants resisted, relying for defense on their fortifications. Due to the resistance, Ismail ordered part of the fortification's wall to be undermined. The fortress's defense was destroyed and many inhabitants were slaughtered. In 1538, the Safavid Shah Tahmasp I put an end to the Shirvanshahs' reign and in 1540, Baku was recaptured by Safavid troops again.
Between 1568 and 1574 there is a record of six English missions to Baku. English men named Thomas Bannister and Jeffrey Duckett described Baku in their correspondence. They wrote that the "...town is a strange thing to behold, for there issueth out of the ground a marvelous quantity of oil, which serveth all the country to burn in their houses. This oil is black and is called nefte. There is also by the town of Baku, another kind of oil which is white and very precious, and it is called petroleum." The first oil well outside of Baku was drilled in 1594 by a craftsman named A. Mamednur oglu. This man finished the construction of a high-efficiency oil well in the Balakhany settlement. This area was historically outside city territory.
In 1636, German diplomat and traveler Adam Olearius described Baku's 30 oil fields, noting that there was a great quantity of brown oil.[citation needed] In 1647, famous Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi visited Baku. In April 1660, Cossacks under Stepan Razin attacked the Baku coast and plundered the village of Mashtaga. In 1683, Baku was visited by the ambassador of the Kingdom of Sweden, Engelbert Kaempfer. In the following year, Baku was temporarily recaptured by the Ottoman Empire.
Baku is noted for being a focal point for traders from all across the world during the Early modern period, commerce was active and the area was prosperous. Notably, traders from the Indian subcontinent established themselves in the region. These Indian traders built the Ateshgah of Baku during 17th–18th centuries; the temple was used as a Hindu, Sikh, and Parsi place of worship.
The fall of the Safavid dynasty in 1722 caused widespread chaos.[citation needed] Baku was invaded by the Russian and Ottoman empires.
On 26 June 1723, after a long siege, Baku surrendered to the Russians and the Safavids were forced to cede the city alongside many other of their Caucasian territories. In accordance with Peter the Great's decree, the soldiers of two regiments (2,382 people) were left in the Baku garrison under the command of Prince Baryatyanski, the commandant of the city. Peter the Great, while equipping a new military expedition commanded by General Mikhail Matyushkin, charged him with sending more oil from Baku to St. Petersburg, "which is a basis of an eternal and sacred flame"—Old Russian: "коя является основой вечного и священного пламени". However, due to Peter's death, this order was not carried out.
In 1733, Baku was visited by physician Ioann Lerkh, an employee of the Russian embassy and, like many others before him, described the city oil fields. By 1730, the situation had deteriorated for the Russians as Nadir Shah's successes in Shirvan forced the Russians to make an agreement near Ganja on 10 March 1735, ceding the city and all other conquered territories in the Caucasus back to Persia.
After the disintegration of the Safavid Empire and after the death of Nader Shah, the semi-independent principality of Baku Khanate was formed in 1747 following the power vacuum which had been created. It was ruled by Mirza Muhammed Khan and soon became a dependency of the much stronger Quba Khanate. The population of Baku was small (approximately 5,000), and the economy was ruined as a result of constant warfare, banditry, and inflation. The khans benefited, however, from the sea trade with the rest of Iran. Feudal infighting in the 1790s resulted in the dominance of an anti-Russian faction in the city resulting in the Russian-leaning brother of the Khan being exiled to Quba.
By the end of the 18th century, Tsarist Russia now began a more firm policy with the intent to conquer all of the Caucasus at the expense of Persia and Ottoman Turkey. In the spring of 1796, by Yekaterina II's order, General Valerian Zubov's troops started a large campaign against Qajar Persia following the sack of Tbilisi and Persia's aim to restore its suzerainty over Georgia and Dagestan. Zubov had sent 13,000 men to capture Baku, and it was overrun subsequently without any resistance. On 13 June 1796, a Russian flotilla entered Baku Bay, and a garrison of Russian troops was placed inside the city. Later, however, Pavel I ordered the cessation of the campaign and the withdrawal of Russian forces following the death of his predecessor, Yekatarina II. In March 1797, the tsarist troops left Baku.
Prince Pavel Tsitsianov was shot to death when he tried to make Baku surrender during the Russo-Persian War (1804–1813).
Coat of arms of Baku Governorate
Tsar Alexander I set out to conquer Baku once again during the Russo-Persian War (1804-1813) during which Pavel Tsitsianov tried to capture Baku in January 1806. But aide-de-camp and cousin of Huseyngulu Khan suddenly shot Tsitsianov to death during the presentation of the city's keys to him. Left without a commander, the Russian Army left Baku and the occupation of Baku Khanate was delayed for a year. Baku was captured on October of the same year and eventually absorbed into the Russian Empire after formal ceding of the city amongst other integral territories in the North Caucasus and South Caucasus by Persia in the Treaty of Gulistan, in 1813. However, it was not until the aftermath of the Russo-Persian War (1826-1828) and the Treaty of Turkmenchay that Baku came under nominal Russian rule, as the city was retaken by Persia during the war.
When Baku was occupied by the Russian troops during the war of 1804–1813, nearly the entire population of some 8,000 people was ethnic Tat.
In 1809, at the time of the Russian conquest, the Muslim population grew to become 95% of the city's population.
On 10 July 1840, the Russian Duma approved "The Principles of Ruling of the Transcaucasian Region", and Baku uyezd was turned into an administrative region of the Russian Empire.
Fortstadt, a new suburb, grew from the dispersed buildings scattered within the city's fortifications. Medieval seaside fortifications were demolished in 1861 to allow for the creation of the port and a customs house in the quay.
Baku became a center of the eponymous province after the devastating earthquake of 1859 in Shamakha. The population of Baku Governorate began to increase steadily. It is recorded that the number of police stations increased. The first Baku stock exchange had ten brokers, all of Russian nationality.
In 1823, the world's first paraffin factory was built in the city, and in 1846, the world's first oil well was drilled in Bibi-Heybat. Javad Melikov from Baku had built the first kerosene factory in 1863. In 1873, the Russian government offered competition for free land, and Baku caught the eye of the Nobel brothers. In 1882, Ludvig Nobel invited technical staff to Baku from Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Germany and founded a colony that he called Villa Petrolea. This colony was located in the "Black City". Bullock-cart drivers used wineskins and flasks to transport oil until the 1870s. In 1883, a Rothschild's plenipotentiary arrived from Paris and created the "Caspian-Black Sea Joint-Stock Company". Famous Baku oil magnates of the era included Musa Nagiyev, Murtuza Mukhtarov, Shamsi Asadullayev, Seid Mirbabayev, and many others.
The companies owned by Musa Nagiyev and Shamsi Asadullayev were the largest of Baku's oil producers. Established respectively in 1887 and 1893, they produced between 7 million and 12 million poods (110 to 200 Gg) of oil annually. The companies owned oil fields, refineries, and tankers. By the beginning of the next century, more than a hundred oil firms operated in Baku.
The oil boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries contributed to massive growth of Baku. Between 1856 and 1910 Baku's population grew at a faster rate than that of London, Paris or New York.
The second half of the 19th century was notable for its advancement in communication. In 1868, the first telegraph line to Tiflis was established, and in 1879, an under-sea telegraph line connected Baku with Krasnovodsk. In the same year, the Baku-Sabunchi-Surakhany was in operation. The tracks were 520 versts (555 kilometres) from Tiflis and was completed in a relatively short time on 8 May 1883. The first telephone line was in operation in 1886. In 1899, the first horse tramway appeared.
In 1870, a Lutheran-Evangelical community was established in Baku. However, in 1937, the clerics as well as the representatives of other religious communities were banished or shot. The Lutheran community was not revived until 1994, after the fall of the Soviet Union.
In the 1870s, the number of administrative and public institutions had grown, among them a provincial court and arbitration. In the first years of the 20th century, a case considered in the district court won great popularity and lawyers from Petersburg, Moscow, Tiflis, and Kiev became involved because of fabulous fees often received there.[clarification needed] The loudest litigations passed with the participation of a certain Karabek, who knew by heart the extensive code of laws of the Russian Empire and remembered all decrees of the Sacred Synod with exact reference numbers and dates.
In the beginning of October 1883, tsar Alexander III with his wife and two sons, accompanied by a huge retinue, arrived to Baku from Tiflis. The railway station had been prepared for the solemn ceremony. The city authorized Haji Zeynalabdin Taghiyev to welcome Alexander. The visitors examined the oil storage of Nobel brothers, the pump station, and three powerful oil wells of Shamsi Asadullayev. Beginning from the 1890s, Baku provided 95% of the oil production in the Russian Empire and approximately half of world oil production. Within ten years, the city had become the foremost producer of oil overtaking the United States.
In 1914–1917, Baku produced 7 million tons of oil each year, totaling 28,683,000 tons of oil , which constituted 15% of world production at the time. Germany did not trust Turkey in oil matters and transferred General Friedrich Freiherr Kress von Kressenstein from the Middle Eastern front with his troops to Georgia in order to enter Baku, through Ukraine, the Black Sea and Georgia. Great Britain, in February 1918, urgently sent General Lionel Dunsterville with troops to Baku through Anzali to block the German troops. Having studied the Caucasus from the strategic point of view, Dunsterville concluded: "Those who capture Baku, will control the sea. That's why it was necessary for us to invade this city." On 23 August 1918, Lenin in his telegram to Tashkent wrote: "Germans agree to attack Baku provided that we would kick the British out of Baku".
Having been defeated in World War I, Turkey had to withdraw its forces from the borders of Azerbaijan in the middle of November 1918. Led by General William Thomson, British troops of 5,000 soldiers arrived in Baku on 17 November, and martial law was implemented on the capital of Azerbaijan Democratic Republic until "the civil power would be strong enough to release the forces from the responsibility to maintain the public order".
In the same year, Thompson was faced with an enormous challenge to recreate confidence in the economy. His fundamental requirement was to recreate a sound and reliable banking system. He wrote, however: "the political situation in Baku does not permit the opening of a British Bank because this would have increased suspicion and jealousy as to British intentions".
In the spring of 1918, Armenian interests in Baku were protected by the Baku Soviet of People's Commissars, who became known as the 26 Baku Commissars.
In February 1920, the 1st Congress of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan legally took place in Baku and made a decision about preparation of the armed revolt. On 27 April of the same year, units of the Russian 11th Red Army crossed the border of Azerbaijan and began to march towards Baku. Soviet Russia presented the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic with an ultimatum to surrender, and the troops entered Baku the next day, accompanied by Grigory Ordzhonikidze and Sergey Kirov of the Bolshevik Kavbiuro. The city became a capital of the Azerbaijan SSR and underwent many major changes. As a result, Baku played a great role in many branches of the Soviet life. Since about 1921, the city was headed by the Baku City Executive Committee, commonly known in Russian as Bakgorispolkom. Together with the Baku Party Committee (known as the Baksovet), it developed the economic significance of the Caspian metropolis. From 1922 to 1930, Baku was the venue for one of the major Trade fairs of the Soviet Union, serving as a commercial bridgehead to Iran and the Middle East.
On 8 February 1924, the first tram line and two years later the electric railway Baku-Surakhany—the first in the USSR—started to operate.
While being in Baku in May 1925 Russian poet Sergei Yesenin wrote a verse "Farewell to Baku":
Farewell to Baku! I'll see you no more
A sorrow and fright are now in the soul
And a heart under the hand is more painful and closer
And I feel the simple word "friend" more distinctly.
However Yesenin returned to the city on 28 July of the same year.
Maxim Gorkiy wrote after visiting Baku: "The oil fields remained in my memory as a perfect picture of the grave hell. This picture suppressed all the fantastic ideas of depressed mind, I was aware of." Well-known—at that time—industrialist V. Rogozin noted, in relation with the Baku oil fields, that everything there was done "without counting and calculating". In 1940, 22.2 million tons of oil were extracted in Baku which comprised nearly 72% of all the oil extracted in the entire USSR.
In 1941, the trolley bus line started to operate in the city, meanwhile the first buses appeared in Baku in 1928.
The US Ambassador to France, W. Bullitt, dispatched a telegram to Washington concerning "the possibilities of bombing and demolition of Baku" which were being discussed in Paris at the time. Charles de Gaulle was extremely critical of the plan according to both his wartime and postwar statements. Such ideas, he believed, were made by some "crazy heads that were thinking more of how to destroy Baku than of resisting Berlin". In his report submitted on 22 February 1940, to French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier, General Maurice Gamelin believed the Soviets would fall into crisis if those resources were lost. However, during the Soviet-German War, ten defense zones were built around the city to prevent possible German invasion, planned within the Operation Edelweiss.
Even a cake for Hitler was adorned by a map of the Caspian Sea with the letters B-A-K-U spelled out in chocolate cream. After eating the cake, Hitler said: "Unless we get Baku oil, the war is lost".
The first offshore oil platform in the world, originally called "The Black Rocks", was built in 1947 within the city's metropolitan area. In 1960, the first Caucasus house-building plant was built in Baku, and on 25 December 1975, the only plant producing air-conditioners in the Soviet Union was turned over for operation.
In 1964–1968, the level of oil extraction rose to the stable level and comprised about 21 million tons per year. By the 1970s, Azerbaijan became one of the largest producers of grapes, and a champagne factory was subsequently constructed in Baku. In 1981, a record quantity of 15 billion m³ of gas was extracted in Baku.
In 1990, Shaumyan rayon of Baku was renamed to Khatai and Ordzhonikidze rayon to Narimanov. In 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Bakgorispolkom as a result, the first independent city mayor Rafael Allahverdiyev was appointed. On 29 April 1992, the names of some more city rayons were changed:
With the initiatives for saving the city in the 2000s, Baku embarked on a process of restructuring on a scale unseen in its history. Thousands of buildings from Soviet Period were demolished to make way for a green belt on its shores; parks and gardens were built on the land claimed by filling up the beaches of the Baku Bay. Improvements were made in the general cleaning, maintenance, garbage collection fields and these services are now at Western European standards. The city is growing dynamically and developing at full speed on an east-west axis along the shores of the Caspian Sea.
Most Soviet era street names have been replaced after the collapse of the Soviet Union. More than 225 streets have been renamed since 1988; however, some people still use the old names. Namely, the first street ever to be built outside the Inner City, originally called Nikolayevskaya after Nicolas I, was renamed to Parlaman Kuchesi, because the Parliament of Azerbaijan Democratic Republic held its meeting in a building located at that street, then during soviet era it became Kommunisticheskaya Ulitsa and now is called İstiqlaliyyet Kuchesi (Azeri: "independence").
I was pumping gas and, looking at this row of dismal topiary, I was struck with thought: is this it? The fabric of memory, the structure of existence, the progression of time? What has my life come to, and where is it headed?
Still in existence are two platform mounds ca AD 1500. Between 1799-1814, a fort existed here named after George Washington's secretary of state, James Pickering. When the city fell to the Union army during the Civil War, another Fort Pickering was constructed in this area. At this time, one of the platform mounds was hollowed out, and served as a munitions bunker. At one section of the area, a marine hospital was constructed and opened in 1884. Originally, the hospital consisted of six buildings: a stable, a surgeon's house, an executive building, two wards, and a nurses' building. During the 1930s, several new WPA buildings were added to the site. In order to make room for the new buildings, several building were torn down and the executive and nurses' building were saved and moved three hundred feet from their original site.
from the book
STRATEGIES d'EXISTENCE"
from the book
STRATEGIES d'EXISTENCE" by Thierry Geoffroy / Colonel
ISBN877245456949
Rhodos Publishing h
from the book
STRATEGIES d'EXISTENCE" by Thierry Geoffroy / Colonel
ISBN877245456949
Rhodos Publishing house 1996
teamLab Planets TOKYO / チームラボ プラネッツ TOKYO DMM.com
人と共に踊る鯉によって描かれる水面のドローイング / Drawing on the Water Surface Created by the Dance of Koi and People - Infinity
The Infinite Crystal Universe
Floating in the Falling Universe of Flowers
意思を持ち変容する空間、広がる立体的存在 - 自由浮遊、平面化する3色と曖昧な9色 / Expanding Three-Dimensional Existence in Transforming Space - Free Floating, Flattening 3 Colors and 9 Blurred Colors
坂の上にある光の滝 / Waterfall of Light Particles at the Top of an Incline
冷たい生命 / Cold Life
やわらかいブラックホール - あなたの身体は空間であり、空間は他者の身体である
So, this is an Indian Fish market, in these 18 years of my existence , this was my first visit!
=D
It wasn't that bad, except the smell woke me up completely early in the morning!
© Silver Spirit (Triyanka Tiu)
Please do not use the images without my permission.
Hollyhocks - 1876
Eastman Johnson (American, 1824 - 1906)
“Hollyhocks” depicts nine young women enjoying a summer afternoon in a garden. They quietly tend the blooming hollyhock plants or casually converse beneath a vine-laden arbor. Their elegant attire and their pretty unlined faces attest to an existence free from the trials of hard work. Refined outdoor activities became an accepted form of leisure after the Civil War, and with the increased industrialization of the late nineteenth century such paintings of pastoral bliss became popular among the newly urbanized elite.
Johnson executed “Hollyhocks” following extensive training in Europe, and the influence of his teacher Thomas Couture is especially evident in the fluid application of color and in the academic method of building up the composition from a series of individual studies. Johnson exhibited one of these studies, “Catching the Bee” (1872; Newark Museum, N.J.) at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1872. This highly finished work shows young woman plucking a single blossom from the tall stem of a hollyhock plant. Four years later Johnson incorporated this figure into the left side of “Hollyhocks”. “Catching the Bee” and “Hollyhocks” display a brighter palette and stronger contrasts of light and shadow than Johnson’s paintings of the previous decade, revealing the artist’s exploration of natural light in the 1870s.
The subject of women in an enclosed garden has a long tradition in art history. The enclosed garden, or hortus conclusus, was traditionally associated with the Garden of Eden, a theme with potent implications for artists of the New World. It was also identified with the purity of the Virgin Mary, and many late-nineteenth-century artists extended this analogy to women in general. An evocative floral language developed to suggest the fertility and beauty of the female sex. In “Hollyhocks” the flowers stand as tall as the women, their lyrical swaying attitudes mirroring the grace of their human counterparts.(1) The women, like the hollyhocks, are arranged decoratively along the periphery of the compound, and the red, pink, and white of their gowns are the colors of hollyhock blooms. Enclosing the hollyhocks--and, by extension, the nineteenth-century women--within the confines of a walled garden allowed them the benefits of air and light without exposing them to the dangers of the rapidly modernizing world. From this sheltered position, both the women and the flowers in “Hollyhocks” become beautiful, but passive, objects of contemplation.
Eastman Johnson was born in Lovell, Maine, and began his career in Boston in 1840 as an apprentice in Bufford’s Lithographic Shop, designing title pages for books and sheet music. He became an itinerant portrait painter in 1842, and for the next seven years he worked in Newport; Portland, Maine; Washington, D.C.; and Boston. In 1849 Johnson traveled to Germany, where he studied at the Düsseldorf Academy, and joined the studio of Emanuel Leutze, who was then working on the second version of his “Washington Crossing the Delaware” (1851; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Johnson continued his studies in The Hague, where he spent three and a half years studying the painterly brushwork of the seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish masters, and in 1855 he enrolled in the Paris studio of Thomas Couture.
Settling in New York in 1858, Johnson opened a studio in the University Building and began work on “Negro Life at the South” (1859; New-York Historical Society), which he exhibited at the National Academy of Design to the acclaim of abolitionists and slaveholders alike. The following years were devoted to Civil War subjects and to the traditional American genre scenes for which he became best known. During the 1860s he began a series of maple-sugaring scenes in Maine and bought his first property on Nantucket in 1871. He was elected an associate of the National Academy of Design in 1859 and became a full member in 1860. Johnson became prominent in New York art circles, joining the Century Association and the Union League Club and becoming a founding trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the 1880s Johnson began to refocus his attention on portraiture, dedicating the last two decades of his career to the depiction of the nineteenth century’s wealthy industrialist class.
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"Acknowledged as the first museum in the world dedicated solely to collecting American art, the NBMAA is renowned for its preeminent collection spanning three centuries of American history. The award-winning Chase Family Building, which opened in 2006 to critical and public acclaim, features 15 spacious galleries which showcase the permanent collection and upwards of 25 special exhibitions a year featuring American masters, emerging artists and private collections. Education and community outreach programs for all ages include docent-led school and adult tours, teacher services, studio classes and vacation programs, Art Happy Hour gallery talks, lectures, symposia, concerts, film, monthly First Friday jazz evenings, quarterly Museum After Dark parties for young professionals, and the annual Juneteenth celebration. Enjoy Café on the Park for a light lunch prepared by “Best Caterer in Connecticut” Jordan Caterers. Visit the Museum Shop for unique gifts. Drop by the “ArtLab” learning gallery with your little ones. Gems not to be missed include Thomas Hart Benton’s murals “The Arts of Life in America,” “The Cycle of Terror and Tragedy, September 11, 2001” by Graydon Parrish,” and Dale Chihuly’s “Blue and Beyond Blue” spectacular chandelier. Called “a destination for art lovers everywhere,” “first-class,” “a full-size, transparent temple of art, mixing New York ambience with Yankee ingenuity and all-American beauty,” the NBMAA is not to be missed."
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www.nbmaa.org/permanent-collection
The NBMAA collection represents the major artists and movements of American art. Today it numbers about 8,274 paintings, works on paper, sculptures, and photographs, including the Sanford B.D. Low Illustration Collection, which features important works by illustrators such as Norman Rockwell, Howard Pyle, and Maxfield Parrish.
Among collection highlights are colonial and federal portraits, with examples by John Smibert, John Trumbull, John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, and the Peale family. The Hudson River School features landscapes by Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Martin Johnson Heade, John Kensett, Albert Bierstadt, and Frederic Church. Still life painters range from Raphaelle Peale, Severin Roesen, William Harnett, John Peto, John Haberle, and John La Farge. American genre painting is represented by John Quidor, William Sidney Mount, and Lilly Martin Spencer. Post-Civil War examples include works by Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, George de Forest Brush, and William Paxton, and 19 plasters and bronzes by Solon Borglum. American Impressionists include Mary Cassatt, Theodore Robinson, John Henry Twachtman, J. Alden Weir, Willard Metcalf, and Childe Hassam, the last represented by eleven oils. Later Impressionist paintings include those by Ernest Lawson, Frederck Frieseke, Louis Ritman, Robert Miller, and Maurice Prendergast.
Other strengths of the twentieth-century collection include: sixty works by members of the Ash Can School; significant representation by early modernists such as Alfred Maurer, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Max Weber; important examples by the Precisionists Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, Preston Dickinson, and Ralston Crawford; a broad spectrum of work by the Social Realists Ben Shahn, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and Jack Levine; and ambitious examples of Regionalist painting by Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry, and Thomas Hart Benton, notably the latter’s celebrated five-panel mural, The Arts of Life in America (1932).
Works by the American Abstract Artist group (Stuart Davis, Ilya Bolotowsky, Esphyr Slobodkina, Balcomb Greene, and Milton Avery) give twentieth-century abstraction its place in the collection, as do later examples of Surrealism by artists Kay Sage and George Tooker; Abstract Expressionism (Lee Krasner, Giorgio Cavallon, Morris Graves, Robert Motherwell, Sam Francis, Cleve Gray), Pop and Op art (Andy Warhol, Larry Rivers, Robert Indiana, Tom Wesselman, Jim Dine), Conceptual (Christo, Sol LeWitt), and Photo-Realism (Robert Cottingham). Examples of twentieth-century sculpture include Harriet Frishmuth, Paul Manship, Isamu Noguchi, George Segal, and Stephen DeStaebler. We continue to acquire contemporary works by notable artists, in order to best represent the dynamic and evolving narrative of American art.