Minna Citron at GMOA

It’s the week after Thanksgiving and I’m sure we’re all either still full of turkey and sweet potato soufflé or getting geared up for the big winter break. But before we kick back and relax on the couch with movie marathons, the Georgia Museum of Art has one more exhibition starting before the holidays. “Minna Citron: The Uncharted Course from Realism to Abstraction” will open on Dec. 8 and run until March 3, 2013.

      The exhibition will showcase roughly 50 of Citron’s award-winning social realist and abstract paintings and sculptures, picked from her 60 years as an artist. The art is on loan from her granddaughter, Christiane H. Citron, and has traveled from museums in Texas, Pennsylvania and Minnesota.

      Minna Citron attended the Art Students League of New York in 1928, and it was during her time there that she created her iconic genre scenes of Union Square and became a member of the 14th Street School. Citron associated with artists such as Isabel Bishop, a renowned graphic artist, and Reginald Marsh, most notable for his paintings of New York City, Coney Island and vaudeville in the 1920s and 1930s.

     Citron’s work initially started out as realist, depicting fine details in the clothes and faces of her subjects. These early works focused more on the roles of women in her satirical style, and during World War II she traveled across the country for the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Program, producing some of her iconic prints based on the women who joined the U.S. Navy. After the war, she moved onto the abstract, strongly emphasizing dynamic shapes that stood out from their backgrounds. During this time she traveled to France to learn new techniques in color printing, which she brought back to the United States. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Citron experimented with collages and other aspects of three-dimensional art, even developing methods for 3D printmaking and assembly. 

Minna Citron
Cold Comfort

Minna Citron
Untitled

      Many of Citron's works hang in prestigious museums, including the Teller Gallery in New York, and GMOA owns a small abstract oil by her that hangs in its permanent collection galleries. The exhibition was organized by Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pa., along with Christiane Citron, and is sponsored locally by the W. Newton Morris Charitable Foundation and the Friends of the Georgia Museum of Art. Paul Manoguerra, our chief curator and curator of American art, will serve as the in-house curator for the exhibition and will lead a tour of it Wednesday, Dec. 12, at 2 p.m. We would be thrilled to see you before and during the holidays when the exhibition opens.

Happy Birthday, Ralston Crawford!

Well known for his Precisionist and geometrically abstract style, Crawford was born in Ontario, Canada, in 1906. He moved with his family at the age of 10 to Buffalo, N.Y., and spent time sailing with his father on the Great Lakes. Following his high school graduation, Crawford worked on cargo ships for six months, traveling to the Caribbean and the Pacific. In 1927, Crawford began his artistic education at Otis Art Institute, working at the Walt Disney Studio as an animator for a side job. He returned to the East Coast to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and at the Barnes Foundation. It was during his later round of studies that he was influenced in his work by the art of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. In 1934, along with being a member of the Independents, a collective of modernist painters, Crawford had his first one-man art show at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Crawford went through multiple artistic phases in his life, the most notable being his Precisionist and geometrically abstract phases. His Precisionist work focused on realistic, sharp renderings of industrial areas, such as factories, bridges, and shipyards, all of which incorporated straight edges and clear borders between separate elements. Crawford’s early work in this vein placed him among other Precisionist artists such as Charles Sheeler, whose noteworthy accomplishments include being one of the founders of American modernism and one of the master photographers of the 20th century. The use of straight lines in the majority of Crawford’s work evolved into his geometrically abstract period, in which he would utilize the shape as the focus of his paintings, taking events such as bullfighting in Spain or spaces such as cemeteries in New Orleans and re-forming them into how he envisioned them in a geometric spectrum.

One of the highlights of Crawford’s career was an assignment from Fortune Magazine. He traveled to the Bikini Atoll in 1946 to record a portion of the events during Operation Crossroads, a series of nuclear weapons tests that provided information on atmospheric and underwater detonations of atomic bombs. The test was incredibly high-profile due to the fact that it was the first detonation of any nuclear device since the bombing of Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945. Additionally, Crawford worked with photography and experimented with film and printmaking. Crawford died on April 17, 1978, in Houston, Tex., succumbing to cancer. 

The Georgia Museum of Art’s permanent collection includes Crawford’s depiction of the blast generated by the atmospheric bomb, nicknamed Able, from Operation Crossroads. For anyone interested in the artistic aspects of such an almost literally “volatile” period in American history, GMOA invites you to come in and experience the reverberations of what Crawford witnessed years ago.

Ralston Crawford
Test Able
1946

Happy Birthday, James Whistler!

Whistler was born in Lowell, Mass., in 1834, and best known for his influence on artistic theory. Early on, Whistler was immersed in art. At the age of 11, he enrolled in the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he did well, before moving back to London with his relatives in 1847.

Though his mother sent him to Christ Church Hall School with the hope that he would become a minister, Whistler felt that a career in religion was not for him. He applied to the United States Military Academy at West Point, where, though he was accomplished at drawing, his grades were poor and he flouted authority. After being dismissed from the academy, Whistler tried his hand at mapping the East Coast of the United States for military and maritime purposes, but was transferred to another division of the Coast Survey. He lasted only two months there before leaving for France to pursue art as his true calling.

Later in his career, Whistler became a leading proponent of “art for art’s sake,” an idea he shared with his friend and rival Oscar Wilde. He believed that art was not something that should strictly illuminate a moral purpose, but should instead serve as an extension of the artist’s persona and emotions. An example of his philosophy, the painting “Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket,” was criticized heavily by the art critic John Ruskin. Whistler ended up suing Ruskin for libel. The artist won but he was only awarded a farthing (a quarter of a penny). The cost of the case and the debts accrued while building his residence caused Whistler to fall into bankruptcy midway through 1879.

"Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket"
James Whistler

Whistler continued to travel and produce art in Paris, London, and Venice. He went where he was commissioned, and his paintings sold well. He also published a book detailing his artistic ideals that, unfortunately, led to a complete breakdown of his friendship with Wilde. Whistler returned to London in 1896, when his wife was diagnosed with cancer; she died two months later. In the final years of his life, Whistler produced minimalist seascapes and corresponded with some of his old acquaintances. He founded an art school in 1898, but his poor health and infrequent teaching schedule led to its closure three years later. His health continued to decline and he died in 1903 on July 17.

The Georgia Museum of Art has a selection of Whistler’s art that highlights many of the qualities he worked to instill in his paintings. The canvases he produced act as his lasting contributions to artistic conversations and debates even today.  

"Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1"
James Whistler