Sheldon Treasures, Fall 2021

Sheldon Treasures August–December 2021 Learning Guide

Sheldon Treasures August–December 2021 The works featured in this iteration of Sheldon Treasures demonstrate the breadth of approaches artists have taken in depicting the human figure. Throughout the history of art, representation of the human form has provided expressive possibilities for stylistic innovation, social commentary, and storytelling.

Sheldon Museum of Art is home to the art collections of the University of Nebraska and the Sheldon Art Association, which was founded by community members in 1888 to foster arts education at the university.

Among these holdings are masterpieces by renowned artists, beloved favorites of museum visitors, and works that have traveled great distances for inclusion in national and international exhibitions.

Exhibition support is provided by Acklie Foundation, Dillon Foundation, Barbara McCuen Sheldon Marketing Fund, Nebraska Arts Council, Nebraska Cultural Endowment, James Stuart III Family Foundation, and Sheldon Art Association.

Sheldon Treasures August–December 2021

Diane Arbus

Walt Kuhn

Lady at a masked ball with two roses on her dress, N.Y.C.

Girl in White Chemise

George Ault The Pianist

Hughie Lee-Smith Poet #4

Willem De Kooning Woman

Jean Dubuffet Tête d’homme de face [Head of a Man]

Louise Nevelson Mountain Figure

David Park Canoe

Fritz Scholder Lilian Westcott Hale

American Portrait with Dog

The Convalescent

Edward Hopper Barkley L. Hendricks Bid ‘Em In/Slave (Angie)

Room in New York

Diane Arbus

New York, NY 1923–New York, NY 1971 Lady at a masked ball with two roses on her dress, N.Y.C. 1967 Gelatin silver print, 14 1/2 x 14 1/2 inches University of Nebraska–Lincoln Anna R. and Frank M. Hall Charitable Trust H-2156.1976

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One of the most prominent and radical twentieth-century photographers, Diane Arbus grew up in an affluent family in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Even though she later said that she “found the family fortune humiliating,” her upbringing gave her a way to connect with the socialites and celebrities she photographed.

Arbus masterfully captured a tension that she has described as “the space between who someone is and who they think they are,”

Diane Arbus

as seen in this photograph of a glamorous

Lady at a masked ball with two roses on her dress, N.Y.C.

woman whose identity is partially concealed at a masked ball.

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George Ault

Cleveland, OH 1891–Woodstock, NY 1948 The Pianist 1923 Oil on panel, 12 x 16 inches Nebraska Art Association Nelle Cochrane Woods Memorial N-106.1958

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George Ault’s The Pianist draws its inspiration from the revue La Chauve-Souris, which made its American debut at New York’s Century Grove Theater in 1922, a year before the painting was executed. In a posture reminiscent of wooden soldiers that were part of the show’s most popular act, Ault’s anonymous pianist sits stiffly at a barely visible piano.

George Ault The Pianist

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Willem De Kooning

Rotterdam, Netherlands 1904–East Hampton, NY 1997 Woman 1954 Charcoal and oil on paper, 25 3/4 x 19 5/8 inches University of Nebraska–Lincoln Anna R. and Frank M. Hall Charitable Trust H-362.1955

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With an exaggerated body and angular features, Willem De Kooning’s Woman embodies the tension between a recognizable female figure and the energetic mark making of action painting. To those who read his gestural handling of paint as aggressive slashes of color and the way in which he depicted the female nude to be menacing or violent, De Kooning famously asserted, “Beauty becomes petulant to me. I like the grotesque. It’s more joyous.”

Willem De Kooning Woman

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Jean Dubuffet

Le Havre, France 1901–Paris, France 1985 Tête d’homme de face [Head of a Man] 1954 Oil on canvas, 9 5/8 x 8 3/16 inches Nebraska Art Association Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Frederick S. Seacrest N-518.1979

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Even though Jean Dubuffet was trained academically as an artist, he rejected conventional ideas of taste, skill, and beauty.

Instead, he found inspiration in art made by children and people with mental illness, in addition to naive and folk artists.

Here, Dubuffet prepared the canvas to render his sitter’s face by applying a layer of white paint over burgundy underpainting.

He then dabbed and scraped away areas of white, leaving a textured surface around the perimeter before incising the figure’s features in a simplistic fashion into the white paint.

Jean Dubuffet Tête d’homme de face [Head of a Man]

Ann Rawley, a longtime supporter of the museum, made the frame for this painting. To learn more about her framing practice and artworks she and her husband James Rawley gave to Sheldon, please visit the exhibition Framing a Legacy in the first floor north galleries.

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Lilian Westcott Hale

Hartford, CT 1881–St. Paul, MN 1963 The Convalescent 1906 Oil on canvas, 30 3/16 x 22 inches Nebraska Art Association Beatrice D. Rohman Fund vN-329.1974

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Lilian Westcott Hale depicted her favorite model Rose Zeffler (known as Zeffy) in a luminous interior, seemingly as one with the bed and blankets in which she reclines. By representing Zeffy as The Convalescent, Hale was likely referencing S. Weir Mitchell’s popular “rest cure,” a nineteenth-century treatment that was considered progressive and humane and was often prescribed by the period’s doctors for a variety of nervous ailments, including hysteria and neurasthenia.

Lilian Westcott Hale The Convalescent

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Barkley L. Hendricks

Philadelphia, PA 1945–New London, CT 2017

Bid ‘Em In/Slave (Angie) 1973 Oil and acrylic on canvas, 72 3/8 x 50 1/4 inches University of Nebraska–Lincoln Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust U-5540.2009

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“She stands proud, defiantly dismissing the label Slave on her tank top. Her hair is naturally styled, not straightened in a quest to meet Eurocentric beauty standards. Her shorts are formfitting, and her boots are high, with a chunky heel. She stands larger than life on a pink background that raises the question of her femininity.

“Like many visual artists, Barkley Hendricks is strongly influenced by music. This painting is a tongue-in-cheek homage to Oscar Brown, Jr.’s 1960 composition of the same name. In the spirit of generations of black musicians, Brown twisted the lyrics so the words of the auctioneer are ironically complimentary, evoking the great history and heritage of

Barkley L. Hendricks Bid ‘Em In/Slave (Angie)

the African-descended people who were enslaved in the United States: Now here’s a real good buy only about 15.

Her great grandmammy was a Dahomey queen.

Just look at her face, she sure ain’t homely.

Like Sheba in the Bible, she’s black but comely.

Bid ’em in!”

– Peggy Jones, associate professor of Black studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, in Painting from the Collection of Sheldon Museum of Art

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Walt Kuhn

New York, NY 1877–White Plains, NY 1949 Girl in White Chemise 1921 Oil on canvas, 30 1/4 x 25 1/4 inches University of Nebraska–Lincoln Bequest of Mary Riepma Ross through the University of Nebraska Foundation U-6326.2013

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In Girl with a White Chemise, Walt Kuhn used the period’s most cutting-edge artistic trends, including an expressionistic use of color and an abstraction of space through the flattening of form, to depict his sitter. He knew of these developments from both his frequent travels to Europe and his role as selector of European works for the famous 1913 Armory Show in New York City, which introduced European modernism to an American audience.

Walt Kuhn Girl in White Chemise

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Hughie Lee-Smith

Eustis, FL 1915–Albuquerque, NM 1999 Poet #4 1954 Oil on Masonite, 24 x 36 inches University of Nebraska–Lincoln Charles W. Rain and Charlotte Rain Koch Gallery Fund U-6291.2013

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Hughie Lee-Smith depicted two figures on an isolated and windswept boardwalk. Although they are connected visually by a snaking rope, neither seems aware of the other’s presence—the woman gazes across the water, and the man, likely a self-portrait of the artist, stands stiffly in a state of introspection.

When describing the solitude that permeates

Hughie Lee-Smith

many of his paintings, Lee-Smith stated, “In

Poet #4

my case, aloneness, I think, has stemmed from the fact that I’m black. Unconsciously it has a lot to do with a sense of alienation.”

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Louise Nevelson

Kiev, Ukraine 1899–New York, NY 1988 Mountain Figure 1946–48 Terracotta with black wax, 25 x 8 3/4 x 5 inches University of Nebraska–Lincoln Gift of Anita Berliawsky U-255.1958

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Influenced by the compact forms of ancient Maya sculpture, especially jadeite figurines that were worn as pendants, Louise Nevelson reduced the female form to three terra-cotta blocks that have been painted to resemble stone. Stacked slightly off-center, these blocks impart a slight sway to the figure, suggesting that movement and dance also informed Nevelson’s work.

Louise Nevelson Mountain Figure

Unknown Maya artist, Deity Figure, 3rd–6th century, jade (pyroxene jadeite), 41/4 x 21/2 x 15/16 inches.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Bequest of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 1979

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David Park

Boston, MA 1911–Berkeley, CA 1960 Canoe 1957 Oil on canvas, 36 x 48 inches Nebraska Art Association Thomas C. Woods Memorial N-168.1964

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Even though David Park began his career making purely abstract paintings, he abruptly turned to the human form as his subject matter, using gestural brushstrokes to depict how the body interacted with its surroundings.

In this canvas, Park highlighted both the interplay of light on the water and the duo who seem intent on breaching the picture plane

David Park Canoe

with their canoe, thereby adding another dimension of illusionism to a painting that explores the balances between figuration and abstraction in a way similar to Willem De Kooning’s work on view nearby.

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Fritz Scholder

Breckenridge, MN 1937–Scottsdale, AZ 2005 American Portrait with Dog 1981 Acrylic on canvas, 80 x 68 inches University of Nebraska–Lincoln Gift of Mrs. Olga N. Sheldon and the Bertha Schaefer Bequest U-3438.1982

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Employing gestural brush strokes and vivid colors, Luiseño artist Fritz Scholder painted a standing figure who is at once indistinct and confrontational, dream-like and direct.

In doing so, the artist drew on the legacy of abstract expressionism and Bay Area figuration, as represented in this gallery by Willem de Kooning’s Woman and David Park’s Canoe respectively.

Fritz Scholder American Portrait with Dog

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Edward Hopper

Nyack, NY 1882–New York, NY 1967

Room in New York 1932 Oil on canvas, 29 x 36 5/8 inches Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Anna R. and Frank M. Hall Charitable Trust, H-166.1936

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Edward Hopper’s depictions of the everyday lives of city dwellers capture the anonymity and isolation of modern urban living. Some of the his most compelling pictures, including Room in New York, are of figures seen through windows, seemingly unaware of being watched. In many paintings made between 1926 and 1932, Hopper included a single figure or couples in compositions that curator

Edward Hopper Room in New York

Judith Barter has described as “[invoking] a hermetically sealed world of emotion.”

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Henry Moore

Castleford, England 1898–Much Hadham, England 1986 Family Group 1947 Bronze, 15 1/2 x 10 1/2 x 7 inches University of Nebraska–Lincoln Anna R. and Frank M. Hall Charitable Trust H-314.1951

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Edward Hopper’s depictions of the everyday lives of city dwellers capture the anonymity and isolation of modern urban living. Some of the his most compelling pictures, including Room in New York, are of figures seen through windows, seemingly unaware of being watched. In many paintings made between 1926 and 1932, Hopper included a single figure or couples in compositions that curator Judith Barter has described as “[invoking] a hermetically sealed world of emotion.”

Henry Moore Family Group

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