Musee des Beaux Arts de Montreal
Wilhelm Lehmbruck
Duisburg, Germany, 1881– Berlin 1919
1914
Cast stone
93 x 46 x 45 cm
Purchase, inv. 1949.1023
Lehmbruck lived from 1910 to 1914 in Paris, but ultimately returned to his native country, where he died an untimely death. The young generation of sculptors strove to forget Rodin by returning to the simplified, solid and measured volumes of antique statuary. This Bathing Woman evokes the classicism of the Greco-Roman Venus Pudica, a figure portrayed modestly covering her nudity. Though influenced by the French sculptor Maillol, Lehmbruck developed a personal style characterized by elegantly elongated forms described at the time as “gothic,” softened by a sfumato-like treatment of the smooth surfaces. The unusual use of cement, or “cast stone,” can be explained by Lehmbruck’s contact with other foreign artists living in Montparnasse, such as Brancusi and Archipenko. By opting pragmatically for this material—less expensive than marble or bronze, but more solid than plaster or terra cotta—they were able to produce low-cost editions in a distinctly modern manner.
Eugene Delacroiz
1821-1822
Romanticism
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, US
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
1875
Impressionism
Barnes Foundation, Lower Merion, PA, US
Rineke Dijkstra, 1993, Chromogenic print, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee, 1998
Rineke Dijkstra is first and foremost a portraitist. Specifically, she documents individuals caught in transitional states of being: mothers just after giving birth; preadolescent bathers poised on various beaches in the United States and Eastern Europe; club kids just off the dance floor in England and the Netherlands; teenage soldiers in Israel. Formally, her comparative series resemble classical portraiture—frontally posed figures isolated against minimal backgrounds—and in some sense follow in the tradition of August Sander, the early- and mid-twentieth-century chronicler of occupational typologies in Germany. In contrast to Sander who sought to fix and identify social types—the baker, the bricklayer, the peasant—Dijkstra searches for glimmers of individuality among like types—a hair out of place, a bead of sweat on the brow, an uneven stance. The uniformity within each series is disrupted by the sitter’s emotional and physical particularities, which often expressly communicate a tension heightened by his or her shifting state.
Although she isolates the bathers in her Beaches series (1992–96) and frames them with only sea and sky, Dijkstra reveals much about them by capturing a subtle gesture or expression in these unguarded moments that reside somewhere between the posed and the natural. The end result is a collaboration between sitter and photographer, a record, however partial, of their interaction. In photographing the already awkward young subjects in their bathing suits, Dijkstra sets up a situation marked by exposure and self-consciousness that parallels the uneasy passage between childhood and adulthood. The images represent individuals from various countries and, as a whole, add up to a meditation on adolescent disconcertment. The photograph is the ideal medium for Dijkstra’s practice precisely because of its explicit suspension of the movement of time: like Dijkstra’s subjects, photographs are always between one moment and another.”
Thomas Hart Benton, 1938, 20th Century
Oil and Tempera on Canvas mounted on Panel
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco