Off the Wall

Off the Wall showcases pieces from our permanent collection individually so you can learn a little bit more about the pieces in our museum one at a time.

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Queen Mary, Reginald Marsh. Watercolor on paper, 1937. Bequest of Mrs. Felicia Meyer Marsh. 1979.1.5

Reginald Marsh was an American painter, born in Paris, most notable for his detailed depictions of life in New York City in the 1920’s and 1930’s. He painted using egg tempera, a forgotten medium revived in the mid-twentieth century. He also produced many watercolors, oil paintings, Chinese ink drawings, and a number of lithographs and etchings.

Marsh attended the Lawrenceville School and graduated in 1920 from Yale University, he then worked as a freelance illustrator, then for the New York Daily News and for The New Yorker. He also submitted illustrations to the New Masses. Marsh was impressed by the ‘old master’ paintings he saw on a 1926 European trip. He returned with a desire to utilize the principles he felt were evident in the art of the Renaissance painters, particularly the practice of taking notes from observation of human subjects in their environments. Marsh then studied under Kenneth Hayes Miller, John Sloan and George Luks at the Art Students League of New York, and chose to do fewer commercial assignments.

Reginald Marsh’s paintings and drawings combine an almost baroque drawing style with a newspaper reporter’s attention to the minutiae of urban public life. Filled with facts, his art is unabashedly topical, often based on his own photographs and numerous on-site sketches. Marsh’s headlines, signs, and advertisements are specific and legible while his faces and figures are often indistinguishable.

Marsh was a great draughtsman, but did not think he would be a painter, for as he recalled, “Painting seemed to me then a laborious way to make a bad drawing. . .” He disliked oil, but of watercolor he said, “Watercolor I took up and took to it well, with no introduction.” In late 1929 Thomas Hart Benton and Denys Wortman introduced him to egg tempera on a gesso ground, which “opened a new world to me” because it was the perfect medium for a draughtsman. In 1930, having found his subjects and his techniques, Marsh joined the Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries and enjoyed artistic success and recognition for the rest of his life.

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Blues, Adolph Gottlieb. Oil on canvas, 1959. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Donald Winston. 1978.3.4

Adolph Gottlieb was born on March 14, 1903 in New York. From 1920-1921 he studied at the Art Students League of New York, after which he traveled in France and Germany for a year. In the mid-1930’s, he became a teacher using his acquired technical and art history knowledge to teach while he painted.

After his 1930’s one-man show he won respect amongst his peers. In 1935, he and nine others, including Ben-Zion, Ilya Bolotwsky, Louis Harris, Jack Kufeld, and Mark Rothko, known as “The Ten” exhibited their works together until 1940. They would come to be known as the Abstract Expressionists.

Gottlieb’s work and awards are found in the Dudensing Galleries in New York, the Guggenheim Museum.  Other places include Paris, Pennsylvania, Texas, Brazil, and others.  One thing that Gottlieb created was “Pictographs” and these are found in New York.

In 1932, he married Esther Dick.  In 1970, he suffered a stroke and was confined to a wheelchair because he paralyzed his left side of his body, but he still continued to paint.  In 1972, he was elected member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.  On March 4, 1974, Adolph Gottlieb died in New York City.

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Dillinger: The Great Mason City Raid, Warrington Colescott. Etching on paper, 1965. Gift of Norwest Bank of Mason City. 1995.11.5

Wisconsin artist Warrington Colescott is best known for his satirical etchings.   Born in Oakland, California to parents of Louisiana Creole descent, food, music and Creole culture played a large role in upbringing.  Comic strips were also important to the young Colescott, especially the work of Des Moines Register cartoonist, Jay “Ding” Darling.  Darling’s caricatural and narrative components greatly influenced Colescott’s mature work.  As a teenager, he discovered vaudeville and burlesque.  The broad humor and slapstick, as well as the eroticism of these performances, would inform his art throughout his career.                                                                  

Colescott created a series of etchings about the Depression-era gangster, John Dillinger, which grew into a suite of images mixing fact and fiction about the farm boy-turned-outlaw who mesmerized the public in the 1930s.  Colescott had no compunction about enhancing the narratives with imagined details and anachronistic additions.

Colescott portrayed Dillinger, known at the time as Public Enemy No. 1, as a super anti-hero in the series.  For The Mason City Raid, he came to the scene and interviewed locals who had been at the event.  Colescott’s version of the crime has the feeling of a movie still, with department store signs in the background and gun molls accompanying the thugs.  Colescott observed, “The Dillinger men took their girls with them wherever they went.  I’ve tried to convey the feeling of the gang: very rowdy, very adolescent, very sexual.” 

On March 13, 1934, John Dillinger and his gang robbed the First National Bank in Mason City, Iowa, and escaped with approximately $52,000.  Surprised bank employees and citizens were used as shields from police gunfire.  A switchboard operator on an upper floor of the bank crawled to a window and shouted news of the holdup to a man in the alley.  He brandished a machine gun and shouted back, “You’re telling me, lady?”  The man was Baby Face Nelson who was standing lookout.

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Rio Hondo, Peter Hurd. Egg tempera on panel. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Donald Winston. 1978.3.7

Peter Hurd, the world-renowned western artist, was born in Roswell, New Mexico, on February 22, 1904. His parents named him Harold Hurd, Jr., but called him Pete, and in his early twenties he legally changed his name to Peter. The elder Hurd came from a prominent Boston family, graduated from Columbia University Law School, and established his legal practice in New York City. Peter Hurd grew up in Roswell, where his parents settled for health reasons. Following three years of high school at New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell, Hurd was accepted as a cadet by the United States Military Academy at West Point. He entered as a plebe in July 1921, at the age of seventeen. Within two years, however, he was disillusioned by the rigors and values of military life and was drawn increasingly to art. In 1923 he resigned from West Point in good standing, with his father’s reluctant consent. He transferred to Haverford College, where he studied the liberal arts and devoted himself to painting. In December 1923, in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, Hurd became acquainted with N. C. Wyeth, an illustrator of children’s classics and the father of Andrew Wyeth. He persuaded Wyeth to accept him as a pupil in the spring of 1924. Hurd soon fell in love with Wyeth’s eldest daughter, Henriette, herself an excellent painter. In June 1929 they married.

In 1959 Hurd was appointed to the Commission on Fine Arts by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1967, he painted what would have been Lyndon B. Johnson’s official portrait. President Johnson only allowed Hurd one sitting, during which he fell asleep. Hurd had to use photographs of Johnson to finish the painting. Johnson did not like his portrait, declaring it “the ugliest thing I ever saw.” The painting is now part of the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, in the Smithsonian Institution.

He worked in a variety of media, including oil, lithography, watercolor, egg tempera, charcoal, and fresco. The most notable of his mural paintings depicting the history of southwestern life can be seen in Lubbock, Dallas, and Big Spring, Texas. Hurd achieved the best expression of his personal vision in the tempera paintings of the place he loved best-the small village of San Patricio, New Mexico, fifty miles west of Roswell, where he built Sentinel Ranch in the 1930s. Painting on panels covered with several coats of gesso, Hurd captured the drama of light and shadow on the hills and the vastness of sky and plain in every kind of weather.

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Twilight, Jasper Cropsey. Oil on canvas, 1877. Museum Purchase. 1979.2

As a young boy, Cropsey had recurring periods of poor health.  While absent from school, Cropsey taught himself to draw.  His early drawings included architectural sketches and landscapes drawn on notepads and in the margins of his schoolbooks. Cropsey studied watercolor and life drawing at the National Academy of Design and first exhibited at there in 1844.  Trained as an architect, he set up his own office in 1843.

Cropsey’s interest in architecture continued throughout his life and was a strong influence in his painting, most evident in his precise arrangement and outline of forms.  But he was best known for his lavish use of color and, as a first-generation member from the Hudson River School, painted autumn landscapes that startled viewers with their boldness and brilliance. The Hudson River School was a mid-19th century American art movement by a group of landscape painters, whose aesthetic vision was influenced by romanticism.  As an artist, he believed landscapes were the highest art form and that nature was a direct manifestation of God.  He also felt a patriotic affiliation with nature and saw his paintings as depicting the rugged and unspoiled qualities of America.

Jasper Cropsey is experimenting with the abstract properties of color, light, and form in Twilight.  It consists of mostly sky with mountainous and forest-like terrain and also shows little bodies of water with deer drinking from them toward the bottom of the painting.  Night is approaching and the clouds are reflected colorfully with the rays from the setting sun to show a beautiful horizon of distant clouds and mountains.

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March, Grant Wood. Lithograph on paper, 1939. Bequest of Katherine M. Zastrow. 1997.14.4

Grant Wood depicted the ordinary people and everyday life of Iowa with both affection and irony.  Wood, along with Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri and John Steuart Curry of Kansas comprised the trio of well-known Midwestern Regionalists. These artists rebelled against the abstraction of European Modernism and insisted that American art should present a picture of the American scene.  During the Great Depression of the 1930s, when a much higher proportion of the population lived on farms, their work was widely appreciated for its reassuring images of the heartland.

Wood’s studied in Europe and was influenced by the precise realism of the early Netherlandish painters.  His style matured into the meticulous, sharply-detailed manner for which his work is chiefly known.  A combination of perceptive insight and dry caricature makes his figure paintings distinctive among the artists of the Regionalist School.

Wood was born in Anamosa, Iowa in 1892 and spent much of his working life in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City.  He was instrumental in capturing images of fast-disappearing farm life.  His final paintings were completed from his studio in Clear Lake, Iowa before his death in 1942.

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Horse Sense, Jaune Quick-To-See Smith. Color lithograph on paper, 1994. Museum Purchase with Funds from the Bill Gildner Memorial Fund. 2009.1

Horse Sense was created by artist, curator, political activist and educator, Jaune Quick-to See Smith.

Quick-to-See Smith was born in Montana and descended from French, Cree and Shoshoni ancestors.  Her father was an accomplished horse trainer and trader, but his work meant she moved frequently. When he was not able to care for her, she lived in foster homes and often experienced discrimination in the schools as a Native person.   School however, was the place where she was first introduced to art materials and fell in love with making art.

Throughout her career, Quick-to-See Smith has worked in many media and today is an internationally-known painter and printmaker.  She is sensitive to the effects of text on images and especially skilled at creating and appropriating texts that capture the paradigms of American culture and open up their meanings. She makes complex juxtapositions that recontextualize the way viewers understand not only relationships between Euro-American and Native culture, but how she, as an artist living in both worlds, views those issues.   Her works are thoughtful and thought provoking, raising questions that explode stereotypes and myths about indigenous people.

The layered and nuanced imagery of Horse Sense is packed full of juxtapositions of loaded images and text, inviting us as viewers to explore its messages.

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Burnt Hill, Maine, John Marin. Watercolor on paper, 1927. Museum Purchase with Partial Support of a Grant from the Kinney-Lindstrom Foundation. 1991.1

John Marin born in Rutherford, New Jersey was an early American modernist artist. Known for his abstract landscapes and watercolors.  John Marin grew up in Weehawken, New Jersey, and attended the Stevens Institute of Technology for a year. His experience with architecture might have contributed to the role played by architectural themes in his paintings and watercolors.

From 1899 to 1901, Marin attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. In Philadelphia he studied with Thomas Pollock Anshutz and William Merritt Chase. He also studied at the Art Students League of New York. In 1905 like many American artists Marin went to Europe, initially to Paris. He traveled through Europe for six years. Marin painted in Holland, Belgium, England, and Italy. In Europe he mastered a type of watercolor where he achieved an abstract ambience, almost a pure abstraction with color that ranges from transparency to translucency, accompanied by strong opacities, and linear elements, always with a sense of freedom, which became one of his trademarks.

John Marin believed he had to know a place intimately before he could paint it. When he executed Schooner Yachts, Deer Isle, Maine, he had been painting on the coast of Maine for fifteen summers. A particularly vocal opponent of what he considered the “self-indulgence’ of pure abstraction, Marin tried to imbue each painting with his love of the visible world. A critic’s observation that Marin painted from an inner vision offended the artist deeply, and was summarily dismissed by him as rubbish. Marin could not conceive of an art of consequence that was not grounded in the act of seeing. To Marin, “seeing” was a “repetition of glimpses” and each painting an opportunity to capture in a single, striking image the “eye of many looking’s.”

Instilled with a modernist’s distrust of illusionism, however, he drew on the resources of his own form of Cubism to explore his response to what he saw and experienced. Marin always insisted that his paintings be both celebrations of the visible world and flat, two-dimensional objects: “I demand of [my paintings] that they are related to experiences … that they have the music of themselves-so that they do stand of themselves as beautiful-forms-lines and paint on beautiful paper or canvas.”

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All About Blue, Helen Frankenthaler. Color lithograph on paper, 1994. John and Mary Pappajohn Endowment Fund Purchase. 2004.2

Helen Frankenthaler, one of America’s most influential women abstract painters, was born in 1928 in Manhattan.  She and her siblings grew up on the Upper East Side, where Helen and her sisters were introduced arts and culture by their intellectual parents at a young age.  Her career was launched in 1952 by the work Mountains and Sea, a large painting that appears to be watercolor, however, is in fact an oil. 

Originally associated with abstract expressionism, Frankenthaler would be later known as a member of the Color Field School of painting.  Color Field is defined by the flat single colors that dominate the work.   These painters set themselves apart from the Abstract Expressionists by eliminating the emotional, mythic, or religious content and the highly personal application of the paint associated with Abstract Impressionists.  Frankenthaler pioneered the technique called “soak stain” which required diluting oil paints with turpentine so that the colors would soak into the canvas.  While revolutionary at the time, unfortunately this led to damage of the canvas long term, as the turpentine caused the canvas to rot away eventually.  She used sponges and even windshield wiper blades to create the effect, manipulating the canvas to be visually flat.

Unlike many female artists of her time, she did not consider herself a feminist; in fact she said “For me, being a lady painter was never an issue.  I don’t resent being a female painter.  I don’t exploit it.  I paint.” Art at this time, however, was still a very male dominated field.  Some critics criticized her work, calling it “sweet” and “poetic” and other terms often associated with females.  But admirers appreciated her gift for freedom and spontaneity.

From 1985 – 1992 she served on the National Council on the Arts of the National Endowment for the Arts and in 2001 she received the National Medal of Arts.  She stirred controversy in the 1980’s due to her disagreement over funding of individual artists.  She felt that artists such as Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe reflected a trend in which the National Endowment for the Arts was supporting work of “an increasingly dubious quality.  Is the council, once a helping hand, now bringing to spawn an art monster?  Do we loose art…in the guise of endorsing experimentation?” she suggested

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I’ll Be A Monkey’s Uncle, Kara Walker. Lithograph on paper, 1996. John and Mary Pappajohn Endowment Fund Purchase. 2003.1

Kara Walker creates dreamlike narratives of nineteenth-century slavery and African-American history using the cut-paper format popular in the Victorian parlor.  In her work she challenges historical memory rather than recreates history.  She turns the safe and domestic silhouette style on its head to explore racial stereotypes in a lyrical and horrific blend that is part slave narrative, part Harlequin romance, and part fairy-tale illustration.

Walker’s silhouettes have elicited an uncomfortable blend of emotions in viewers since she first began showing them.  She refers to the images in her work as her “inner plantation” and states, “The whole gamut of images of black people, whether by black people or not, are free rein in my mind.  Each of my pieces picks and chooses willy-nilly from images that are fairly benign to fairly charged.  They’re acting out whatever they’re acting out in the same plane; everybody’s reduced to the same thing.  They would fail in all respects of appealing to a die-hard racist.  The audience has to deal with their own prejudices or fears or desires when they look at these images.  So, if anything, my work attempts to take those pickaninny images and put them up there and eradicate them.” 

I’ll be a Monkey’ Uncle from 1996 is one of Walker’s earliest prints. Just a year later, in 1997, she was the youngest artist to receive a prestigious MacArthur Award.

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Title Unknown, Lee Krasner. Print on paper. Ackerman Print. 2000.7

Lee Krasner was a mid twentieth-century Abstract Expressionist artist.  Abstract Expressionism, characterized by individuality and spontaneous expression, gained popularity after World War II and was the first specifically American art movement to achieve international influence.

Krasner was born in Brooklyn, New York to Russian Jewish immigrant parents.  Her early art training was at The Cooper Union, Art Students League, and the National Academy of Design in New York.  She was determined to make a career as an artist and worked for the WPA Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1943, taking classes from the famed Hans Hoffman.  Her early work was illustrative, but she quickly moved to modern styles such as Cubism.  By 1940 she had begun showing her works with the American Abstract Artists, a group of painters dedicated to modern form.  In 1945 she married fellow abstract artist Jackson Pollock. 

Krasner’s early work consisted of drawings and paintings which she would often cut apart to create collages.  Exceedingly critical of herself, she often discarded entire series, leaving few surviving examples of her work.  It is believed that this critical eye was important to the development of not only her work but her husband’s.  Krasner moved away from Cubism and adopted a direction more like her husband’s; in her words to “lose Cubism” and “absorb Pollock”. As a woman, she struggled with the public’s perception of her, especially as the wife of the famous Pollock.  She often signed her name by her initials, leaving it genderless.

Krasner died in 1984 at the age of 75.  Six months after her death, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City held a major retrospective of her work, an honor that they have bestowed upon few women artists.

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The Watcher, Marvin Cone. Oil on canvas, 1947. Museum Purchase with funds from the Roy B. Johnson Memorial. 1976.1

Born in Cedar Rapids, Marvin Cone grew up with fellow Iowa artist Grant Wood.  The two remained great friends and painted together throughout their lives.  In 1920s, they studied current painting trends in France and during the Great Depression established the short-lived Stone City Art Colony in eastern Iowa.  Cone graduated from Coe College in Cedar Rapids in 1914 and taught French there from 1920 to 1934, when he established the art department and continued his long teaching career.   

Cone is known for his series of paintings of Iowa farmhouse interiors.  He created the realistic but mysterious room in the The Watcher by playing with perspective and color.  A portrait of Cone’s Uncle Ben, whom he remembered as a grim and quiet figure, hangs crookedly on a wall overlooking two half-opened doorways adding to the painting’s intrigue.

Watch our Art Talk to learn more: https://youtu.be/nwNyNkLEVlM?feature=shared

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