At the 1952 Venice Biennale, Deputy Commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion, Eloise O. Spaeth, employed a different approach with mixed results. Four established and well-known artists – Edward Hopper (1882-1967), Stuart Davis (1892-1964), Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1893-1953), and Alexander Calder (1898-1976) – were honored with small retrospective exhibitions. In his review of July 20, 1952, Stuart Preston of the New York Times expressed disappointment with the uninspired exhibition concept, stating that the American Federation of Arts “play[ed] [it] safe this year.” Despite this critique, Preston found merit in the apt selection of Hopper to represent the United States abroad. Preston observed that: “Hopper made the deepest impression. Foreigners recognized, and rightly, something authentically American in the pathos of his landscapes, a germ of loneliness which they detect in our literature.” The IMA’s Hotel Lobby (1943), which was among the works displayed at the 1952 Biennale, conveys the feeling of isolation described by Preston and noted by the show’s attendees. Hopper’s figures, whether alone or in the company of others, appear detached from their surrounding environment.

Edward Hopper, "Hotel Lobby," 1943. William Ray Adams Memorial Collection. ©Edward Hopper.

The motif of the contemplative figure is hardly unique to the work of Hopper, or even American art, though. Scholar Gail Levin and others have cited artistic precedence in the domestic interiors of Dutch seventeenth-century painter Jan Vermeer (1632-1675), which were likely seen by Hopper on his many trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or on the three occasions he visited Europe from 1906 to 1911. According to art historian Pamela Koob (“States of Being: Edward Hopper and Symbolist Aesthetics”), Vermeer studies experienced a revival during this period due to the organization of several exhibitions in New York.

Hopper’s paintings also bear a strong resemblance to those of Dane Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916). In December 1912, an exhibition of Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish art, sponsored by the American-Scandinavian Foundation and organized by Christian Brinton, opened at the American Art Galleries in New York. Since Hopper lived in the city at this time, it is possible that he was introduced to Hammershøi’s paintings in person or in print, as they were discussed in three separate New York Times reviews. Interestingly, art critics lauded the curator’s selection of Hammershøi and praised the authenticity of his work. In a preview of the exhibition, published  August 11, 1912, a Times reporter found that Hammershøi “…not yet in his fifties, has taken an isolated place in the art of Denmark, belonging to no school, and betraying in his work no clearly defined inheritance from the past.”

Vilhelm Hammershøi; Interiør med ung læsende mand 1898.Olie på lærred. 34,4 x 51,8 cm. (via www.hirschsprung.dk)

Forty years apart, the reviews of Hopper and Hammershøi exhibited rather provincial slants, as they failed to acknowledge the wider application of the artists’ themes.  However, Robert Rosenblum’s seminal Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition (1975) would later propose the existence of a “Northern” sensibility, which manifested itself in the artistic production of Europe and America for at least a century and a half. Noting parallels in form and feeling, Rosenblum traced a trajectory from the German Romantic landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) (who, incidentally, popularized the motif of a contemplative figure seen from the back, called a Rückenfigur) to the chromatic abstractions of Mark Rothko (1903-1970). Clearly, the cases of Hopper and Hammershøi substantiate Rosenblum’s argument. (The prolific scholar even identified the works of the two artists as analogous in a 1997 essay on Hammershøi.) Yet, the broader context of their paintings seems to have been lost on critics of the American-Scandinavian exhibition in 1912 and, later, of the 1952 Biennale.

You ask me,”Are you a blogger?”  My response is, “Not yet.”  My name is Jenni Clarkson, and I would like to be the next IMA blogger.  I’m 37 years old and live on the west side of Indianapolis, not far from IMA.  My Bachelor of Arts degree was initially just supposed to be in English, but I wound up with a double major in English and Art because I couldn’t stop taking art classes.  My current day job is as Assistant Managing Editor of the Journal of General Internal Medicine.  It’s a good gig for someone with an English major, but it’s not the most creative place for me.  That’s why I decided a couple of years ago to start taking some art classes again.  My hobbies include reading and writing (but certainly not arithmetic), as well as creating art, looking at art, and talking art with anyone who is willing. I should be the next IMA blogger because I love art, and I am enthusiastic about sharing that love.

You’ll find a sample ‘story’ below. 

LEFT BEHIND

No, this isn’t about apocalyptic fiction or even about the time my parents went home for Sunday dinner without realizing I was still at the church; it’s about my being so mesmerized by one IMA exhibit that my tour group left me there—and it’s also about the legacy that Edward Hopper left behind as displayed in that mesmerizing exhibit, Edward Hopper: Paper to Paint.

I was taking my first art class in many years, after a lengthy hiatus from both academia and art.  The class was an applied art class in fundamentals of design, and so the students’ interests were varied.  Before making a field trip to IMA, our professor asked us about our favorite artists.  I mentioned Edward Hopper, a favorite of mine for many years.  The professor asked if I was aware that IMA was hosting a special Hopper exhibit, Paper to Paint. I had no idea, and I was thrilled to have the opportunity to see it.

Edward Hopper, Hotel Lobby, 1943

When we arrived at the museum, I stayed dutifully with the class looking at the decorative arts and listening to the professor tell the group about Art Nouveau.  All the while, I was biding my time, delaying gratification, waiting to see Hopper.  When we finally reached the special exhibit, I could hardly contain myself.  There were his sketches; there, before my eyes, was Hopper’s creative process laid bare.  Sketch after sketch, each were somehow similar yet divergent, and all were from Hopper’s pen.  I’ve read a few graphic novels over the last few years, and I enjoy finding the story in the pictures.  Here was a story in pictures like nothing I had ever seen before.  Here was Hopper’s struggle to tell a story, draft after draft hanging on the walls.  Here was the story of how Hotel Lobby came to be.  And I was surprisingly comforted.  If Hopper, my artistic hero, could go through so many iterations and such struggle to complete a single painting, maybe I should have more hope for my seemingly unending process of sketch after sketch.  I’ve sometimes been guilty of tossing sketches out after I reach the end of a project, but I was so grateful for these sketches Hopper left behind.  As I emerged from my thoughts, I realized I was alone in the room.  My group had gone on without me, but I was happy to be left behind.

In the comments on that last post Karen T discussed the importance of being able to make a 1:1 comparison between a radiograph and a painting, and then Christina responded with some first-hand experience with our new system. I confess, though: I cheated a bit and asked Christina to answer that question because, after all, Christina is an experienced paintings conservator here at the IMA, and I’m not.

Christina and I were talking about all of this when the Chief Conservator, David Miller, walked into the lab and joined the discussion (you can find out more about both of them on the Mainardi web page). To make a long story longer, the three of us decided to put together an example that illustrates how the new system handles the 1:1 comparison issue. So David and Christina printed out an image to demonstrate a 1:1 comparison of the radiograph and the painting. The photo above is of Christina holding a 13” x 19” print out of a radiograph of the IMA’s Edward Hopper’s 1943 painting Hotel Lobby. The painting was fully radiographed as part of a technical study of Hopper’s painting technique for an exhibition (and catalogue) opening at the IMA in August of 2008, called Edward Hopper; Paper to Paint, that explores the relationship of the artist’s drawings and studies to the finished painting.

Here you can see a close up of the 1:1 comparison. You’ll have to wait for the exhibition to open later this year to find out more about what was being looked at in this painting, but in the mean time have a look in the bottom right corner of the radiograph and you can see a piece of hardware that is helping to keep the painting’s stretcher in place.

In case you want to know, here’s a spec sheet on our new printer and here’s a spec sheet on the 13” x 19” photo paper we used. Finally, you can go here and here to see two documents that discuss the Print Permanence Ratings for this printer and paper combination. And, if your super geeky like me you can watch part 1 and part 2 of our printer in action. Weeee … watch it print!

In addition to the two images I’ve shown here, I’ve uploaded some more to my Flickr page that attempt to illustrate the printing process and to show our comparison in the gallery.

Beyond the 1:1 comparison issue, there are a couple of other things to consider when comparing the use of film radiographs to digital. A lot of paintings (and objects) are bigger than a single piece of film or photo paper. With film, conservators often trim and combine multiple sheets onto a light box so that the assembled radiograph can be compared to a painting. It seems logical that the exact same thing could be done with a print out, but we haven’t had a reason to try it yet. However, one of intriguing tools of CR is the ability to make enlargements of certain sections of radiographs. And, within these images you can make measurements and a variety of annotations. The image below illustrates some of these functions.

As for the other comments about the conservation of radiographic images, I’d like to say thanks, Alison, for keeping the CR topic close to the broader issues. I think it’s important to keep it in context and I certainly don’t mind at all if the discussion gets broadened to include the archiving and sharing of film-based radiographs (though I think we should draw the line and not include the whole topic of conservation documentation in the digital form in this post – we could be here for months if not years if we got started on that one!).

Taking this post off topic, I want to point out one of my favorite punk bands: the X-Ray Spex; it doesn’t get much better than Warrior in Woolworths, and besides what conservator wouldn’t like a lead singer named Poly Styrene.

Anyway, please feel free to add a thought, comment, or question. As I mentioned, we haven’t had this equipment for very long and though we’ve mastered some aspects of it, to some extant we’re still finding our way with it.