German American Heritage Month: Pennsylvania German
The more things change, etc. I get really irritated with people who say in speeches that immigrants to the United States should “speak American.” For one thing, “American” isn& ...
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Curator's Corner
A Bridge: Jasper Johns
The impression a reader gets from some surveys of art history, unfortunately, is that one artistic movement ends and another picks up in a totally different direction. We know this is not true when we ...
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Curator's Corner
Gently Waft into Fall: Elizabeth Otis Boott Duveneck
Since I don’t know many people who enjoy seeing summer end, I use the words “gently waft” instead of “fall” for this post. What better way to mark—not celebrate&mda ...
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Curator's Corner
A Consistent Concretist: Carmen Herrera
I recently learned about an artist who turned 100 this past may. Turning 100 is fabulous, and even more fabulous is discovering that this artist was ahead of her time stylistically in painting, but di ...
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Curator's Corner
Smile of the Buddha in Art
The look on the Buddha’s face of serenity is probably what some of us acquired after having a three-day weekend for Labor Day. But, this image intrigued me because—as is the case with ever ...
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Curator's Corner
Photo Phear: George Barnard and Gertrude Käsebier
I am Totally not into getting my photograph taken, especially while on vacation, so I am the last person on Earth who should criticize the way other people come out in photographic portraits. I don&rs ...
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Curator's Corner
Vacation Blog: Provincetown Modernism
I’m off on a week’s vacation in Provincetown, which, as you may know, has been the home of a thriving art colony since the late 1800s. The Provincetown Art Association was founded in 1914, ...
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Curator's Corner
A Realism Backlash? Modern Art Heads
After the horrors experienced by Europeans in World War I (1914–1918), the brakes were more or less put on to the prevailing trend towards modernism and abstraction, although certainly many arti ...
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Curator's Corner
Painting or Print? Albert Bierstadt
Yes, Sunset (California Scenery) is a print. But, what a print! I will admit, before I learned a little bit about art when in college, I would have seen such a chromolithograph in an antique shop and ...
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Curator's Corner
The Essence of Essence
I’ve been reading manifestos by several early modernist artists from Europe recently (Kandinsky, Boccioni, Doesburg), and a recurring thought comes out in all of their writings. It is the idea t ...
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