The solemn nothings that fill our everyday life blossom suddenly into bright possibilities —Helen Keller Life is such an actual thing —Dennis Miller Bunker Is it just me or is Dennis Miller Bunker’s painting Wild Asters more than beautiful (Fig. 1)? The blue stream rushes under us, grasses bending in the current, and the streamside bushes spray on either bank. …
Thomas Cole’s Hat
Thomas Cole’s hat, on view at Cedar Grove, the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, in Catskill, New York, prompts a deceptively simple question. What is it to be an artist? The more we think of that question the more difficult and maybe unanswerable it becomes. Thomas Cole’s hat and carrying case, nineteenth century. Labeled “WATKINS, 128 FULTON STREET, Sun Building, …
The glitter of Night Hauling: Andrew Wyeth in the 1940s
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May/June 2012 | How do we account for the strangeness of Andrew Wyeth’s art of the 1940s? How, that is, beyond discerning the surrealist undertones, finding the magic realist affinities, or seeing that Wyeth followed in a Brandywine tradition whose oddity was firmly established by Howard Pyle-lone pirates on desolate shores; magicians and curly-shoed dwarves; Revolutionary …
George Ault and 1940s America
What does it mean for an artist to make a world? Consider the case of George Ault, and more especially of Black Night: Russell’s Corners (Fig. 1), a painting he made in 1943 in Woodstock, New York, where he moved in 1937 and lived until his death eleven years later. Showing old barns at a junction a few hundred yards …