Lecture: Visions of America with William Perthes
Wayne Art Center • 413 Maplewood Ave Wayne, PA 19087 Organized by Wayne Art CenterAbout this event
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Description
Visions of America: Urban Abstract versus Regionalist Painters of the Early 20th centuryWilliam Perthes LectureWednesday November 13
6-7:30 PM
Photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz is credited with bringing modernism to the American public. The first to exhibit the works of Picasso and Matisse Stieglitz soon organized a group of artists that included Georgia O’Keeffe, John Marin, Aurthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and Charles Demuth who were actively adapting modernism to an American sensibility. However, in reaction to growing urbanization in the early 20th century another group of painters turned their back on the city and set their sights on rural America. Portraying a landscape and lifestyle that was rapidly retreating, or never actually existed, artists like Thomas Hart Benton, John Curry, and Grant Wood created a new rural mythology. Historically, these groups have been viewed as in opposition. This talk will look at the tension between two seemingly divergent visions of America and consider how they reflect broader inclinations in the US. In the early 20th century.
Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930. Oil on composition board, 30 34 x 25 34 in. (78 x 65.3 cm). Art Institute of Chicago
William Perthes is an educator, author, and curator. He is the Bernard C. Watson Director of Adult Education at the Barnes Foundation. Bill has a background in philosophy and art history and is the author of “The Barnes Method” included in the recently published The Barnes: Then and Now. Much of Bill's work focuses on how experiences with works of art, both short and long term, can impact and inform fields as varied as business, medicine, law enforcement. and restorative justice. Bill is the curator of Faces of Resilience a traveling exhibition of original works of art created by currently and formerly incarcerated artists at the State Correctional Institute Phoenix. In addition, his scholarship has focused on American Modernism with a special concentration on the Abstract Expressionist painter Robert Motherwell. He is the former Director of Education for the Violette de Mazia Foundation.
Instructor
William Perthes