April 2023
Norman Lewis, Ad Reinhardt, Adolph Gottlieb, Dorothy Dehner: Our Pictographic and Skeuomorphic Era
Andrianna Campbell-LaFleur joins us from Yale University for our second talk in the spring Muscarelle Explorations series, Modern Masters at the Margins. Painters such as Norman Lewis, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Dorothy Dehner looked to notational stand-ins for meaning. The stick figures and simplified marks were graphic interfaces developed to be capable pictorial descriptors of more complex language systems. Interested in the research of anthropologists such as Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Mead and post-structuralist anthropologists such as Claude Levi-Strauss, artists paired these ideas with instinctive line-making. For them this pairing of rational and id-based notation systems were places of…
Find out more »Abstract Artist Lynne Mapp Drexler’s Journey from Virginia to Maine
Art historian and scholar Gail Levin will join us for the fourth talk in our spring Muscarelle Explorations series, Modern Masters at the Margins. Imagine a story of an artist who escaped from an art world rife with competition and her struggle to find herself, landing on an enchanted island, where she lived happily ever after, painting, though forgotten, for the rest of her life. She went so far as to write to a friend what her dealer could tell collectors who inquired about her: “advise them I’d become a hermit — an eccentric one and that I come to…
Find out more »