From the Education archives: During the 2008-09 academic year, the AMAM displayed works by the Cheyenne warrior-artist Howling Wolf in the exhibition The Painted Arrow People: Art of the Cheyenne. While the show was on view, every fifth-grade student in the Oberlin City School district came in to see the works as part of their unit on Native American cultures.
We recently re-discovered some of the illustrated ‘thank you’ notes they created in response to this visit - and were struck at how sophisticated they are in terms of using the visual language of Howling Wolf. They also came up with (or borrowed) great names to identify themselves in the works (cute: Red Feather, cool: Crows Spits Blood).
From the Vault: We mark today’s birthday of President Abraham Lincoln with this rare tintype from the AMAM collection. This example is obviously valuable because it depicts one of the most sought-after portrait subjects of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, the fact that it is a tintype is intriguing given that medium’s infrequent use in celebrity portraiture. Most images of Lincoln available for sale are albumen prints, other than a group of tintype buttons made for the 1860 presidential campaign.
Lincoln was born on this day in 1809, and was elected to two terms as President.
Image:
Hannay Ferrotypes, Brooklyn, NY
Abraham Lincoln, 19th century
Tintype
Gift of Mrs. Theodore L. Bailey
AMAM 1980.23
From the Vault: “Not to be shocking means to agree to be furniture.” – Peter Saul
Artist Peter Saul has always pushed boundaries with his artwork, offering searing social commentary through brightly colored, cartoon-like figures. His artwork has been connected with artistic movements like Pop Art, Surrealism, and the Hairy Who painters from Chicago, but his work defies easy categorization. As he has said of his own work, he “has spent a lifetime avoiding easy critical definition.”
Here Saul offers commentary on the Vietnam War. The title “Amboosh” can be found in the bottom left corner where an unofficial subtitle is also offered for the work – “Typicul Veet Nam.” The background of the piece recalls the style of tranquil Japanese prints, but with a perverse twist. Here we see a hyper-sexualized and violent image of Vietnamese women and American soldiers who have captured and are torturing each other. This is a prime example of Saul’s work - controversy is not just emphasized, it is embraced.
Although Saul’s work has taken some time to gain recognition, he is now a widely acknowledged artist. Among other honors, he has received two grants from the national Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work. He currently lives in New York City.
For more information on Peter Saul, here is a link to an interesting interview with him from The Brooklyn Rail: Peter Saul with Irving Sandler and Phong Bui
Image:
Peter Saul (American, b. 1934)
Amboosh, 1975
Color lithograph
Gift of Allan Frumkin, AMAM 1982.81
From the Vault: John Martin was one of the most important nineteenth-century Romantic painters working in Britain and was known for his dramatic interpretations of classical and biblical themes.
The baroque drama of Cadmus and the Dragon evokes the Romantic fascination with distant times and cultures; in this example, the scene is from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and is Martin’s earliest-known depiction of a classical subject. It closely follows Book III, which describes how Cadmus, sent by his parents to search for his sister Europa, consulted the Oracle of Delphi and learned that his destiny was to start a great city, the future Thebes. The Oracle told Cadmus that he should build the new city on the spot where a certain cow laid down to rest. The cow was to be sacrificed in a ritual requiring water from a sacred spring, but the men Cadmus sent to fetch the water were slaughtered by a dragon, offspring of the god Ares, that guarded the spring.
In style, the painting looks back to the bravura seventeenth-century landscapes of Salvator Rosa and to his contemporary Claude Lorrain’s classical heroic landscapes. Cadmus and the Dragon was painted one year after Martin’s Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion (now in the Saint Louis Art Museum), which introduced the artist’s successful formula of a tiny but heroic figure placed in a landscape with Romantic overtones. The small but muscular Cadmus fights a dragon whose gigantic claws nearly encircle his body. Reminiscent of Henry Fuseli’s nightmarish visions, Cadmus and the Dragon poses its two combatants in a dark, rocky landscape illuminated by a vivid shaft of light.
This work was recently included in the exhibition “John Martin: Apocalypse” at the Tate Britain.
Image:
John Martin (English, 1789–1854)
Cadmus and the Dragon, 1813
Oil on canvas
R. T. Miller Jr. Fund and Friends of Art Endowment Fund
AMAM 1976.42
From the Vault: Made during the apogee of the Moche people of the north coast of Peru, this painted ceramic exemplifies the portrait jar, so-called because of the naturalistic, three-dimensional rendering of individual facial features. This portrait jar is relatively unusual within the genre, because it depicts a blind man wearing a simple cloth headdress and because it lacks the stirrup-spout handle of most Moche portrait jars.
The Oberlin portrait jar belongs to a small group of ceramic depictions of individuals who are blind in one or both eyes and who appear to have enjoyed some importance in Moche society. Moche portrait jars almost certainly represent individuals of high status, many of whom are thought to have been key officials, if not rulers. Even those who appear to be blind seem otherwise healthy; and when they are depicted on full-figure vessels, they are never bound, deprived of their clothing, or otherwise marked with traits identifying them as enemy prisoners. It has been suggested that blind individuals and other physically deformed people were believed to have certain supernatural powers, and thus enjoyed special privileges and duties in Moche society.
Read more on this work at the AMAM Collections page.
Image:
Peruvian (North Coast, Moche culture)
Portrait Jar Depicting a Blind Man, 400 – 500 AD
Tan pottery with brown, white, and black paint
Mrs. F. F. Prentiss Fund, AMAM 1973.33
New blog feature: From the Vaults! We’re starting a new, semi-regular feature on our blog that highlights art in the AMAM’s permanent collection of almost 14,000 works that are not currently on view, and may not have been for several years.
Today, we feature this print by the contemporary Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. Last on view in the fall of 2008, shortly after its acquisition by the AMAM, this work is representative of Murakami’s exploration of the blurred boundaries between fine art and popular culture. He’s known for exploring otaku (the Japanese term for an obsession with anime and cartoons), and deriving inspiration from manga (comics created in Japan, which often use exaggerated, expressive facial features to denote the emotional state of characters). Murakami’s work is sometimes referred to as Neo-Pop or Poptical.
Image:
Takashi Murakami (Japanese, b. 1962)
Melting DOB E, 2008
Color lithograph
Museum Friends Fund, AMAM 2008.10
