Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

I fell in love with Willem Kalf’s painting, below, after watching the ArtBabble video In the Gallery: Mark Doty. Mark is a poet who toured the gallery and talked with staff about various works in the galleries and how we see paintings. The way he described the work was particularly appealing to me.

And you can see how, I mean, it’s painted, this bravura, I mean this coil and the light and then the incredible translucency of the peeled fruit. It’s hard to imagine now how it must have looked... Well, we are always going to be looking at and celebrating that the stuff of the world, you know.

Still Life with a Chinese Porcelain Jar by Willem Kalf

Recently, this work  has caught my attention again, as I’ve had the opportunity to spend a bit of time in the galleries here at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. I love the process of “getting to know” a work of art; the way it becomes like a familiar friend, and yet somehow, each time completely delightful and new.  It has me thinking about what catches my attention in each one, and some similarities between the very disparate works that I love. The first thing to come to mind? FOOD. Read the rest of this entry »

William Edouard Scott, American, 1884-1964, “Simeon and the Babe Jesus,” oil on canvas mounted to Masonite, 98 x 44 inches, Health and Hospital Corporation of Marion County, Indiana

It was a monumental undertaking one that had never been attempted at another American hospital.  Murals in public buildings were a new concept in 1914. Only the Library of Congress and the Boston Public Library had successfully completed similar projects.  The idea of bringing art to Wishard, then known as City Hospital, started on a very small scale with the idea of commissioning a local artist to create an oil painting for the new Burdsal units which had just opened in 1914. A committee of local artists was asked to select the artist, but the committee came back with a better suggestion.  Why not enlist several Indiana artists to paint murals on the hospital walls?  William Forsyth, a prominent member of Indiana’s famous Hoosier Group, agreed to oversee the project. At the conclusion of many months of work, sixteen Indiana painters had created thirty-three different murals that covered a quarter mile of the hospital’s wall space.

This included well-established artists such as, T. C. Steele, Otto Stark, Clifton Wheeler, Wayman Adams, J. Ottis Adams, and Forsyth himself, and younger painters and local art students such as Simon Baus, Walter Hixon Isnogle, Carl Graf, Jay Connaway, Emma B. King, Dorothy Morlan, Martinus Anderson, Francis E. Brown, Helene Hibben and an African American artist, William Edouard Scott, who would make a name for himself as a mural painter along with his other successful artistic endeavors.  Most of this group received housepainter’s wages, slept in empty wards and ate in the hospital kitchens, while the established artists painted in their studios and received no more than $150 a month for their work.

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