Traditional Roots: Family Paintings in “A World Apart”

Unsurprisingly, Skagen artists found willing models in their family members. Anna and Michael Ancher painted each other as well as other members of the close-knit Brøndum family, as shown in the “Family” section of A World Apart: Anna Ancher and the Skagen Art Colony.

Michael Ancher, Christmas Day 1900 (Marie, Hulda, and Ane Hedvig Brøndum, Helga and Anna Ancher), 1903; Oil on canvas, 55 ⅞ x 87 in.; Skagens Museum

In Christmas Day 1900, Michael Ancher painted Anna and her female relatives in the dining room of Brøndum’s hotel. Owned by Anna’s family, the inn was the only one in Skagen and became a quasi-clubhouse for Skagen artists. Nearly life-size, this work depicts Anna (at the far right) alongside her sisters, mother, and daughter, Helga. In contrast to the turbulent seascape paintings behind them (also painted by Michael Ancher), the Brøndum and Ancher women seem reserved and serene. While this painting is representative of official group portraits of the time, it also provides an intimate look at their family.

Skagen artists drew influence from Dutch masters like Rembrandt, Haals, and Vermeer. The figures in Christmas Day 1900 are reminiscent of those in 17th-century painting, in which seated and standing figures face outward around a table.

Anna’s mother, Ane Brøndum, became one of her favorite models. She painted her aging mother many times over the years, keeping her company as she sat. Two portraits of Ane Brøndum showcase Anna’s wide range of styles.

(left) Anna Ancher, Portrait of mother (Mrs. Ane Brøndum), 1913; Oil on canvas, 31 x 24 ⅞ in.; Skagens Museum and (right) Anna Ancher, Mrs. Ane Hedvig Brøndum (Anna Ancher’s Mother), ca. 1905; Oil on canvas, 21 7/8 x 17 1/2 in,; Skagens Museum

The profile portrait of her mother (1905) is rendered in dark colors with controlled brushstrokes. In contrast, a frontal portrait of Ane Brøndum (1913) depicts the older woman in a lighter palette of pastel blues, pinks, and purples. Not just a study in form, this work illustrates Anna’s interest in light and color. Her fluid paint application and unblended brushstrokes effectively capture the effects of light and shadow.

The thematic gallery’s family focus provides an additional layer of context with which to consider Anna Ancher and her contemporaries. As seen in the personal portraiture of the Skagen artists, Anna and her fellow painters reference the past and simultanteously embrace the avant-garde.

—Emily Haight is the Member Relations Associate at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

NMWA’s Nordic Cool

In honor of A World Apart: Anna Ancher and the Skagen Art Colony, on view through May 12, 2013, we’re researching other delightful, innovative, and interesting Danish women in the arts. Click here to learn more about NMWA’s current exhibition.

Some of the earliest seeds for NMWA’s current exhibition, A World Apart: Anna Ancher and the Skagen Art Colony, were planted nearly a decade ago when curatorial staff members visited Scandinavia to research Nordic Cool: Hot Women Designers. This exhibition, on view at NMWA during April–September 2004, was a hit, and although it was NMWA’s first-ever design exhibition, it opened the curators’ eyes to Scandinavian women artists such as fascinating Danish painter Anna Ancher.

Women in the Arts magazine cover, Spring 2004, with Nanna Ditzel’s “Bench for Two,” 1989

Several of the Danish designers whose work was on view at NMWA were creating domestic-use products that addressed gender roles—such as Johnna Sølvsten Bak’s tablecloth with “iron burns incorporated into the design” as Jordana Pomeroy described in the spring 2004 issue of Women in the Arts magazine. Another example, “Danish industrial design team PAPCoRN (Lene Vad Jensen and Anne Bannick)…created compostable dinnerware from corn by-products.”

Of furniture by Nanna Ditzel—pieces with “curvilinear structures [that] would be as comfortable in a gallery as in a living room”—Pomeroy said, “Ultimately design is highly personal, often bearing traces of the artist’s hand, reflecting the proportions of the designer’s body, and deriving from the most intimate emotional memories. Ditzel’s designs flow with the human body while simultaneously drawing on other natural sources: seashells, coral, flowers, and butterflies.”

—Elizabeth Lynch is the editor at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

The Skagen Terrain: Land and Sea Paintings

“Skagen was a magical city of beaches entirely surrounded by water,” writes Skagens museum curator Mette Bogh Jensen in the exhibition catalogue. 

As one of the thematic sections of A World Apart: Anna Ancher and the Skagen Art Colony, “Land and Sea” showcases the artists’ fascination with the unspoiled landscape of the seaside town.

Carl Locher, The mail coach, 1885, Oil on canvas, 23 ⅝ x 37 ¾ in.; Skagens Museum

Skagen’s beaches, fields, and “special light,” were well-suited for artists who wanted to pursue painting en plein air, or outdoors.

Adventurous artists and visitors traveling to remote Skagen had to spend the better part of a day in a horse-drawn carriage along the shore, as depicted in Carl Locher’s The mail coach. The thickly impastoed scene shows sandy dunes with a carriage approaching in the distance.

Among the most dramatic depictions of outdoor subjects are large-scale scenes of fishermen at work, often presenting turbulent seas and thunderous clouds. Painters such as P.S. Krøyer found themselves frequently frustrated by the weather: they couldn’t easily work outside during storms, but on calm-weathered days when they were eager to paint from life, their models—fishermen from the town—needed to be working at sea.

Michael Ancher, A stroll on the beach, 1896, Oil on canvas, 27 ⅛ x 63 ⅜ in.; Skagens Museum

However, Skagen’s beach also became a place of leisure and recreation after an increase in tourism in 1890. Michael Ancher’s A stroll on the beach perpetuates this idealized view of Skagen life by showing middle-class women enjoying the bucolic setting.

Furthermore, sea views were not the only nature scenes worth depicting. Skagen also had fertile fields where farmers grew a variety of grains.

Anna Ancher, Harvesters, 1905, Oil on canvas, 17 ⅛ x 22 ⅛ in.; Skagens Museum

In The Harvesters, Anna Ancher portrays laborers returning from the fields. She was “the only Skagen painter who painted the cultivated landscapes,” as Jensen revealed in a gallery talk.

Skagen’s terrain was both rugged and pastoral, providing the burgeoning artist colony with a plethora of compelling subject matter.

—Emily Haight is the publications and marketing/communication intern at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. 

Happy Birthday, Leonora Carrington!

The art of Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) belongs to “a magical realm between sleep and waking, conscious and unconscious.”¹ On April 6, 2013, we celebrate the enchanting artist on what would have been her 96th birthday. From a grade-school rebel to rising in Surrealist ranks, Carrington escaped Nazis and mental institutions, and found herself at home in Mexico.

From an affluent family in England, Carrington was groomed to be a debutante.  Resisting the confines of conformity, Carrington ran away from boarding schools and was reportedly expelled for exhibiting “anti-social tendencies and supernatural proclivities.”

Leonora Carrington in her studio in Mexico City, ca. 1950, by Emeric Weisz; Courtesy of Paul Weisz-Carrington

Ultimately, her parents yielded to her passions and allowed her to pursue an arts education in London, under cubist Amédée Ozenfant.

Carrington became inspired by Surrealist art after visiting London’s International Surrealist exhibition in 1936. A year later, she met and fell in love with a pioneer painter of Surrealism, Max Ernst, and lived with him after he divorced his wife.

She began to paint her own dreamlike works and attend Surrealist gatherings, where she famously served guests omelettes with their own hair. Adored by the group but also recognized for her artistic talent, Carrington exhibited with them internationally.

During World War II, German-born Ernst was imprisoned and Carrington escaped to Spain where she had a breakdown and was committed to a mental asylum. When her family sent their nanny to collect her, Carrington fled to the Mexican embassy. She married Mexican diplomat Renato Reduc to facilitate her flight from Europe.

Upon moving to Mexico City, Carrington became an integral part of a thriving artistic community along with her friend and fellow Surrealist, Remedios Varo. After divorcing Leduc, she married Hungarian photographer Emeric Weisz and had two sons.

Leonora Carrington, Samhain Skin, 1975; Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay; © 2012 Leonora Carrington / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Carrington enjoyed a successful career with many solo and group shows around the world, including a one-woman exhibition at New York’s Pierre Matisse Gallery.

As a painter, sculptor, and writer, Carrington’s works integrate imagery from disparate cultural sources. Inspired by Mayan folklore, Celtic legends, Tibetan Buddhism, alchemy, and the occult, her otherworldly works are both eerie and whimsical.  Chimeric figures often animate her complex interiors and magical landscapes.

NMWA’s collection contains two of Carrington’s works. Carrington painted Samhain Skin on animal skin, recalling an ancient Celtic festival. This work’s anthropomorphic figures allude to mythical fairy people, sprung from the stories her Irish grandmother told her.

In a dimension between genius and insanity, Carrington’s heightened mental state conjured some of Surrealism’s most visionary works. Although she was a charismatic artist with a prolific, seven-decade career, she remains an enigma. A rogue in her own right, Leonora Carrington refused to reveal the meanings behind her haunting images, and they will forever be left to viewers’ imaginations.

—Emily Haight is the publications and marketing/communications intern at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. 

Notes:

1. Alberth, Susan L. (2004). Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art. Lund Humphries, p. 33.

Thoughts on Freya Grand’s “Minding the Landscape” (Part 2 of 2)

(This is Part 2 of a series on Freya Grand—click here for Part 1.)

In addition to the Romantic and sublime that can be seen in Freya Grand’s work, the idea of “minding the landscape,” and her way of presenting it, also recalls the thinking of Leonardo with regard to the earth and the elements. Leonardo spent many years researching geology and water, and conceptualizing the formation of the earth, both in his writings and his paintings. He too went exploring mountains, which were, for him, the most visible manifestation of the way the earth came into being, and to some extent, he can be seen to have anticipated Burke’s theory of the sublime.

Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin of the Rocks, ca. 1486

Leonardo wrote that coming upon a great cavern he “stood for some time, stupefied and incomprehending of such a thing…Suddenly two things arose in me, fear and desire: fear of the menacing darkness of the cavern, desire to see if there were any marvelous thing within it.” This experience gave rise to the cavernous rocks in his painting The Virgin of the Rocks (1483, Louvre, Paris).

But Leonardo also spoke of the earth being a body, a living being that resembled the human body in many ways. The rocks are like bones, he said, the framework of the body. The rivers and streams are like the veins and arteries. The ocean tides are like the earth’s breathing.

I feel that Grand’s paintings convey this connection of body and earth, depicting a sense of deep, hidden life in those waters moving over rocks, in those magnificent volcanoes and sweeping mountain ranges. In her representation of them, they seem to breathe and move, as if still in formation.

Freya Grand, (Left) Study for Cloonagh, 2010; (Right) Cloonagh Rocks, 2012; Images courtesy of the artist

Thought of in this way, Grand’s art has a rich art historical pedigree. Her art reflects Leonardo’s love and awe of nature and her systems, and connects to European Romanticism. But her family line includes the great landscape painters of America like F.E. Church who, like Grand, sought out the wild beauty of remote places. She has added her own misty link to that chain.

—Claudia Rousseau, Ph.D. ,is Professor of Art History in the School of Art + Design at Montgomery College (Silver Spring, MD). She is also an AICA-awarded art critic and freelance curator in the Washington, D.C., metro region.

Thoughts on Freya Grand’s “Minding the Landscape” (Part 1 of 2)

(This is Part 1 of a series on Freya Grand—click here for Part 2.)

At her recent artist’s talk, Freya Grand discussed her process of creating the inspiring works currently on display at NMWA. Emphasizing her travels to remote and wild places, she related her habit of documenting what she sees with photographs and small sketches on site, even creating watercolors if weather permits, and then taking all that back to her studio in Washington, D.C. Her head full of images of what she has seen, the artist proceeds to get those visual memories out onto paper in exquisite graphite studies for her paintings.

Freya Grand, Plume, 2005; Courtesy of the artist

With each step of the process, Grand separates out the details, the accidental human or animal appearance in the scene, and focuses on the earth, the air, the water, and the fire—the elements, as it were, that underlie her subjects. The exhibition’s title gives us a hint here. Grand’s work is so compelling because it is not descriptive in the ordinary sense. These paintings are not an imitation of nature, but a re-creation of experience achieved from mind to hand to canvas in a process that is in many ways reminiscent not only of the great Romantic painters of the 19th century, but going back further, to the example and the concepts of Leonardo da Vinci.

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea Mist, 1818

The first word that probably comes to mind when looking at Grand’s landscapes is “sublime.” Like many, I have noted connections with painters like J.M.W. Turner or Caspar David Friedrich, artists who tried to find ways to manifest 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke’s ideas concerning the notion of the sublime in actual works of art. The sublime is an experience that involves the element of fear, something beyond the merely beautiful or picturesque because of that fact. It is something that most people have experienced in nature, for example while standing on the edge of a rocky cliff, feeling simultaneously exhilarated and overwhelmed at the greatness of what is in front of us, but feeling the fear of its danger at the same time.

Such experiences inspire Grand on her explorations into nature, and it is why her works are so moving and contemplative for most viewers. Her work completely conveys the sense of the experience of the artist confronting the natural scenes that are captured in both small and large paintings in this exhibition. Precisely because they are not specific, and that they often defy an understanding of scale, beyond admiration they provoke memories of such things in the viewer of his/her own moments of the sublime. The first time I saw Grand’s work, these rushed in on my mind, and kept me looking, and thinking, for a long time.

—Claudia Rousseau, Ph.D., is Professor of Art History in the School of Art + Design at Montgomery College (Silver Spring, MD). She is also an AICA-awarded art critic and freelance curator in the Washington, D.C., metro region.

April Fools: The Art of Trickery

In a celebration of high jinks and jokes, take a look at pranksters in NMWA’s collection. Among art tricksters’ tools of deception are optical illusions, unconventional materials, and trompe l’oeil techniques.

Judy Chicago, Pasadena Lifesavers Red #5, 1970, Sprayed acrylic lacquer on acrylic, 60 x 60 in.,Gift of Elyse and Stanley Grinstein

Viewers may see a brown square in the center of Judy Chicago‘s vibrant Pasadena Lifesavers Red #5, although none truly exists.

Gestalt theory explains that the human brain has a tendency to create a “whole” image from individual elements. Instead of seeing only the four octagonal shapes, the human mind perceives a brown square, thus linking the separate pieces together.

Another perceptual puzzle is Chicago’s Queen Victoria. The colorful spiraled circle at the center of the composition appears to move, creating a dizzying effect.

Judy Chicago, Queen Victoria (from The Great Ladies series), 1972; Acrylic on canvas, 40 x 40 in.; On loan to NMWA from Elizabeth Sackler

A variation of the “Rotating Snakes” illusion, this painting’s apparent motion is seen in an observer’s peripheral vision. The illusion is strongest when the design contains repetitive color gradations that follow curved edges. This illusion adds to the painting’s dynamism, making it more mesmerizing than disorienting.

Another deceptive work is L.C. Armstrong’s Blue Shift. Not an optical illusion in the traditional sense, this work’s surprise lies in its medium. Armstrong’s composition may simply seem like a nonobjective painting, but the artist’s materials include acrylic paint, synthetic resin, birch plywood—and a bomb fuse.

L.C. Armstrong, Blue Shift, 1996; Acrylic and bomb fuse under synthetic resin on birch plywood, 48 x 40 in.; Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection

In her artistic process, Armstrong first ignites the bomb fuse and then encases the piece in resin. While Armstrong can control the placement of the fuse, she cannot predict how it will mark the surface. Among her other explosive works are paintings of flowers, in which she uses bomb fuses as stems.

NMWA’s collection also contains several trompe l’oeil still-life paintings, which involve realistic imagery to create the illusion that the depicted objects are 3D. Trompe l’oeil literally translates to “tricks the eye.” Among NMWA’s illusory works are the floral still-lifes of Rachel Ruysch and Claude Raguet Hirst’s A Gentleman’s Table.

Which other visually striking works pose a cognitive conundrum?

—Emily Haight is the publications and marketing/communications intern at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.