Professor Cacoilo
April 29, 2017
Extra Credit Assignment
The Newark Museum
The Newark Museum located in Newark, New Jersey is a prestigious museum that carries an incredible amount of distinguished art collections from around the globe. The Museum has collections from Western Hemisphere and also has collections that include Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Indian and Southeast Asian Art. A main focus in this museum is the american art collection called "Seeing America". "The renowned American art collection, on view in Seeing America, ranges from Colonial portraiture to a superb collection of Hudson River School landscape paintings, folk and outsider art, as well as major works of modern and contemporary art in all media." (Newark)
From the "Seeing America" collection, it was essential to focus on the 18th & 19th-Century exhibit. The exhibit has many different sub galleries and the main attraction that I would like to focus on on two paintings from the "Gretchen W. and James L. Johnson Gallery".
The first painting I would like to focus on from the selected gallery is Florine Stettheimer's Flower Piece from 1921.
The message in the title displayed the flower piece to be as:
"Stettheimer has used an abstract vocabulary to create an image that has a sense of delicacy, whimsy and beauty. The handles and stem of the vase look so fragile they would break if disturbed. The paint in the flowers seems to have a all its own, at moments becoming thick and having tremendous presence, other time becoming lines of color that have nothing to do with making the flowers look real."
The message I feel addresses the issue of gender, patriarchy and feminism. It represents these issues from all through the flowers, representing the female gender, which are living in this weak vase. Moreover, the vase can be ideally representing this society and its weak mind of gender roles in this patriarchy structure of the 1920s.
The artwork actually does catch the eye. It catches the eye with the variety of color and ideal flowers painted for the audience to see. I think without the description provided by the little plaque, it may go unnoticed to just a regular bystander with no art background.
It is an important to the discussion art due to impact it contributed to modernism movement. The exhibition gallery for this museum does impact the significance of the painting. It can be seen with other paintings that help contribute to the modernism movement. An example of an other painting from the same gallery is Georgia O'Keefe's White Flower on Red Earth, No. 1 from 1943. Overall, with the use of the gallery, it does creates a feeling for an observer to create a wonder to why are the images being painting and what is the true meaning being represented. It encourages the observer to look outside of the museum for answers.
Work Cited:
Newark Museum Visitor's Guide. (n.d.). Retrieved April 29, 2017, from http://www.newarkmuseum.org/sites/default/files/NewarkMuseum_VisitorGuide.pdf
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