10 Ancestral America Object Labels

[These are texts for the Native America section.] Ansel Adams (United States, 1902–1984) Georgia O'Keeffe and Orville Cox, Canyon de Chelly, 1937 Gelatin silver print Private collection Malcolm Varon O'Keeffe at Ninety Walking in Field at Ghost Ranch, 1977 Cibachrome print Collection of Malcom Varon © Malcolm Varon [ This text and the two photographs listed above will appear with a mannequin garbed in original the artist’s own clothing from the G O’K Museum. The photos show her wearing outfits virtually identical to those on the mannequin.] All of her life, Georgia O’Keeffe dressed in natural fabrics, favoring black and white. She rarely wore anything that was readymade. In the early years, she was her own seamstress. Later, she had clothes made to her own designs. The longer she stayed in New Mexico, the more she favored full-skirted black dresses worn with white silk blouses and pulled together at the waist by belts made by Mexican silversmiths. She wore a variety of hats, hoods, and scarves reminiscent of desert headwear from around the world. Her face weathered by the sun and her body dressed as austerely as a nun, she increasingly looked like she belonged to the parched New Mexico landscape. Photographers documented O’Keeffe as a buoyant vaquera or cowgirl as well as a saintly presence alone in her adobe home or in the desert.

Marsden Hartley (United States, 1877–1943) Painting No. 50, from the Amerika series, 1914 Oil on canvas Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection Many modern artists found Native American culture an antidote to the pressures and commercialism of the city. One lure was the antiquity of native cultures—they were said to be America’s Greece and Rome. Another was the respect natives cultures invested in nature and the land. Living in Germany in the mid-teens, Hartley wanted to build bridges between modern American art and the much older native cultures of his country. Painting No. 50 was, in part, inspired by Hartley’s visits to the Berlin ethnographic museum that had a superb collection of American Indian tribal art. That year he wrote: “I find myself wanting to be an Indian. To paint my face with the symbols of that race I adore, go to the West and face the sun forever—that would seem the true expression of human dignity.” John Marin (United States, 1870–1953) Dance of the Santo Domingo Indians, 1929 Watercolor and chalk on paper The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection At the urging of painter Georgia O’Keeffe, John Marin, another artist in New York’s Alfred Stieglitz circle, visited Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the summer of 1929. He attended Pueblo ceremonial dances, calling them “my greatest human experience.” In Dance of the Santa Domingo Indians, Marin used the forceful lines and angles of modern art to capture the repeated movements of native dances. He worked in watercolor, a difficult medium because it does not allow for corrections. Marin was a master of watercolor, deftly getting it right with each first stroke. George L.K. Morris (United States, 1905–1975) Pocahontas, 1932 Oil on canvas McNay Art Museum, Gift of Robert L.B. Tobin George L.K. Morris (United States, 1905–1975)

Indians Hunting # 4, 1935 Oil on canvas University of New Mexico Art Museum, Purchased with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts with matching funds from the Friends of Art, University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque In the 1930s, Morris was a New York artist who continued the tradition of visiting Santa Fe and painting native themes in a modernist style. He became one of the founding members of a group known in the 1930s and 1940s as American Abstract Artists. Morris, like his contemporary Stuart Davis, kept the search for the Great American Thing alive for another generation. B.J.O. Nordfeldt (United States, born Sweden, 1878–1955) Antelope Dance, 1919 Oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe, Museum Purchase with funds donated by the Archaeological Society and Friends of Southwestern Art Nordfeldt lived off and on in Santa Fe from 1918 to 1937. In this vivid painting, he captured the look and the rhythm of a native dance in which men dress in similar ceremonial costumes—here as antelopes— and move in a line to the same step and beat. In seeking his own modern statement as an American artist, Nordfeldt adopted the abstracting vision of French painter Paul Cezanne for his Native American subject. Georgia O'Keeffe (United States, 1887–1986) Horse's Skull with White Rose, 1931 Oil on canvas Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Extended loan, private collection O’Keeffe began spending summers in northern New Mexico in 1929 and moved there permanently in 1949. In this high desert and mountain landscape, she found an unspoiled America. It inspired a new form of still life, one that used the bleached bones of horses and cows she picked up on her walks. She called the bones her “symbols of the desert.” As she had done earlier with flowers and leaves, she painted animal skulls very close up, forcing the viewer into an intimate exploration of surface textures, cracks, and cavities. Looking at these

paintings elicits a visceral response, the skulls at once recalling the Old West and evoking the modern desire for deep and personal encounters with nature. Georgia O'Keeffe (United States, 1887–1986) Kachina, 1931 Oil on wood panel Collection of Gerald and Kathleen Peters, Courtesy Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico When O’Keeffe began spending summers in northern New Mexico, she was introduced to contemporary native American villages and culture. On several occasions, she painted kachina dolls made by the tribes of the region. These are wooden figures with varied faces and garb, imaginatively decorated in strong colors and abstract designs. Georgia O'Keeffe (United States, 1887–1986) Kachina, 1945 Oil on canvas Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Gift of The Burnett Foundation Alfred Stieglitz (United States, 1864–1946) Georgia O'Keeffe: A Portrait [Hands with Horse Skull], 1930 Gelatin silver print The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

[These are texts for the Folk America section.] Romare Bearden (United States, 1911–1988) The Visitation, 1941 Gouache with ink and graphite on brown paper Estate of Romare Bearden, Courtesy of Romare Bearden Foundation, New York In the early 1940s, Romare Bearden looked back to the early years of his youth and his family’s southern heritage as a source for his art. He had been born in Charlotte, North Carolina, and in 1914 moved north with his family to settle in Harlem. As an artist, he made a trip back to the South in 1940 to recall scenes that were typical for many African Americans before they migrated north. His painting captures life in the rural South in a style that is both modern and unstudied and folk. William H. Johnson (United States, 1901–1970) Early Morning Work, about 1940 Oil on burlap Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Harmon Foundation William Henry Johnson was born in South Carolina and traveled widely to develop his artistic talents in New York, Paris, and Denmark. When he returned to live in the United States during World War II, he began a series of paintings reflecting upon the joys and hardships of AfricanAmerican life in the rural, agricultural South. Adopting a style that was self-consciously folklike and accessible, Johnson used a bright palette, flattened figures, and spare backgrounds to convey images of the work, churchgoing, and family life he recalled from his youth. “My aim,” he wrote, “is to express in a natural way what I feel, what is in me, both rhythmically and spiritually, all that which in time has been saved up in my family of primitiveness and tradition, and which is now concentrated in me.” Yasuo Kuniyoshi (United States, born Japan, 1889–1953) Boy Stealing Fruit, 1923 Oil on canvas Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, Gift of Ferdinand Howald Boy Stealing Fruit consciously mimics the imagery and style of earlier American painting of itinerant portraitists such as Girl in a Red Dress

hanging in this gallery. Kuniyoshi, born in Japan, immigrated to New York in 1906. As he matured as a painter, he, along with many of his artist friends, fell under the sway of American folk art, buying pieces for his own home and studio. The large bulbous head, schematic facial features, and pudgy arms in this painting are modern distortions but simultaneously reveal a reverence for the Americana that was in vogue in 1920s New York cultural circles. Ammi Phillips (United States, 1788–1865) Girl in a Red Dress, about 1835 Oil on canvas Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection Charles Sheeler (United States, 1883–1965) Vermont Landscape, 1924 Oil on canvas Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia “My interest in early American architecture and crafts,” wrote artist Charles Sheeler, “has been as influential in directing the course of my work as anything in the field of painting.” The painter collected American antiques, favoring Shaker furniture, rag rugs, and ceramics. He also took an interest in 19th-century American paintings and watercolors made by men and women who had little formal artistic training. In its stylized figures, flattened forms, and unschooled perspective, Sheeler’s Vermont Landscape pays homage to these earlier American artists. The white church with its prominent spire and the quaint horse and buggy also harks back to a mythologized New England of an earlier America. Charles Sheeler (United States, 1883–1965) Interior, 1926 Oil on canvas Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Gift of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Between 1926 and 1934, Sheeler made seven paintings depicting the antiques and Americana he collected and displayed in his home. Interior is the first work in this masterful series, in which he interpreted vernacular works from America’s past as having a formal relationship

to his own precisionist painting style as a modernist. For this work he set up a still life of articles in his home, all of whose designs were spare and geometric. Then, he rendered them with a corresponding austerity. Sheeler’s style originated in cubism, and he enjoyed odd angles of vision—here, looking down and across the room at the same time. He juggled the edges and scale of the pieces to make a remarkably tight composition, one that is abstract as well as descriptive. Charles Sheeler, Staircase, Doylestown, 1925. HMSG Charles Sheeler frequently used the spaces and things in his own homes as his subjects. This painting was inspired by the staircase in an old 1768 fieldstone house in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia. In his early years as an artist, Sheeler lived in the simple house on holidays and weekends. Concentrating on the spare but elegant craftsmanship of the old staircase, Sheeler created a painting of unusual perspective, complicated geometry, and spiraling line. He made the old appear modern. Marguerite Thompson Zorach (United States, 1887–1968) Ella Madison and Dahlov, 1918 Oil on canvas Williams College, Museum purchase, John B. Turner ’24 Memorial Fund and Karl E. Weston Memorial Fund The one-year-old daughter of artists Marguerite and William Zorach was cared for by Ella Madison, a one-time singer with a strong personality. In this painting, the child and nursemaid recall similar figures in historic, American folk art. The solid forms and rough-hewn quality in partnership with complicated, cubist patterning come together in an iconic image that is both modern and American. William Zorach (United States, born Lithuania, 1889–1966) Kiddie Kar, 1923 Rosewood Middlebury College Museum of Art, Vermont, Purchase with funds provided by the Friends of Art Acquisition Fund and the Christian A. Johnson Memorial Fund William Zorach was among the modern artists who admired and collected pieces made by earlier rural craftsmen. As a sculptor, he was

particularly impressed by 19th-century carvers who cut directly into wood and stone, a very unforgiving process. Kiddie Kar plainly recalls early American wood sculptures where the visible marks of the tools cutting into the wood communicate rawness and energy. This sculpture depicts the young Tessim Zorach, son of the artist couple William and Marguerite Zorach, riding a scooter.