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ART HISTORY LECTURES AT THE AKMA

Open to the public at no charge, Dr. Brett Knappe will be presenting college-level lectures surveying art history over the past 5,000 years.  Everyone is welcome to attend, whether you have studied art history or not.  To learn more about the lectures CLICK HERE.

 


 

CURRENT EXHIBITIONS




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PERMANENT COLLECTION

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William Verelst (b. England). Portrait of John Law, 1727. Oil on canvas. Purchased with funds donated by the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation.
Philip L. Hale (American, 1865-1931). Musical Movement, ca. 1910-20. Oil on canvas. Purchased with funds donated by the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation. Philip Leslie Hale was born in Boston. He received his first art instruction from his sister, Ellen Day Hale. After private lessons from Julian Alden Weir in New York, he attended a number of academies: the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Arts Students’ League; the Academie Julian; and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Hale was a regular exhibitor at shows across the United States during the first two decades of the twentieth century, supplementing his income by writing are criticism for the Boston Herald and the Boston Evening Transcript. He also taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts for over 30 years.
George Wesley Bellows (American, 1882-1925). The Coming Storm, 1911. Oil on panel. Purchased with funds from the William Toben Memorial Fund. George Bellows was a native of Columbus, Ohio, and attended Ohio State University, where he excelled in art and athletics. In 1904 he left college to study art under Robert Henri at the New York School of Art. Like other associates of Henri, such as William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan, Bellows was interested in a realistic portrayal of American society and urban life. Characteristic of his style is a vigorous physicality, not only of subject matter, but also of color and brush stroke. Bellows had the distinction of being the youngest artist to be awarded associate membership in the National Academy of Design. He was very active in the New York art scene and founded the Society of Independent Artists. He continued his successful career in New York until his premature death of appendicitis in 1925.
William James Glackens (American, 1870-1938). Hillside with Olive Trees (Rue de Varenne), 1925. Oil on canvas. Gift of Florence and Robert McDonnell. William Glackens was born in Philadelphia and began his career as an illustrator for the Philadelphia Press, while studying under Robert Henri at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He went to Paris for a year in 1895 and upon his return painted muted landscapes in a Whistlerian manner, a style that soon changed to a stronger one reminiscent of Daumier, early Manet, and Cezanne. In 1898 he moved to Cuba with George Luks, and when he returned, became best known for his colorful scenes of holiday crowds and fashionable life painted in a lively manner. He returned to France in 1906, and visited Spain at the same time. He participated in the 1908 exhibition of The Eight, in which he stood out as the colorist. He worked in New York until 1925, then returned to France, where he remained until 1932. Glackens was influenced by Renoir during and after this time but used muted colors. He was elected to the National Academy in 1933 after winning many prizes in his later years.
Edward Hopper (American, 1882-1967). Civil War Campground, 1926. Watercolor on paper. Purchased with funds donated by the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation. Edward Hopper was born in Nyack, New York, and by 1899 had already decided to become and artist. He studied under both William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri, one of the fathers of American Realism. In October 1906 he traveled to Paris and also visited London, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Brussels. This influence remained with him for a long time. Hopper’s career was slow to take off and by the age of thirty-seven was still a commercial illustrator. By 1929 Hopper had become extremely well known, and his painting Early Sunday Morning was the Whitney Museum’s most expensive purchase up to that time. Hopper’s paintings combine apparently incompatible qualities- modern bleakness and simplicity, yet are full of nostalgia. His true importance has only been realized in the years since his death.
Wayne Thiebaud (American, b. 1920). Man Sitting-Back View, 1964. Oil on canvas. Purchased with funds from The William Toben Memorial Fund and donations from museum friends, Mr. & Mrs. Margaret Marshall and Mr. and Mrs. David H. Morton. Wayne Thiebaud became known in the early 1960s with this straightforward, Pop-art influenced still lifes, and figures. Thiebaud himself cites an influence from the French Realist painters Gustave Courbet and Edward Manet. Thiebaud devised an unusual approach to painting people, depicting them as stationary and seemingly suspended in time. This painting from 1965 is a fine example of his early style where the figure is outlined in beautifully subtle color and the background is a smooth buttery-white. Prior to his first one-person show in New York in 1962, Thiebaud worked as a cartoonist and commercial artist. He continues to live and work in the San Francisco Bay area.
John Sloan (American, 1871-1951). Suppertime, 1917. Oil on canvas. Purchased with funds donated by the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation. John Sloan grew up in Philadelphia. His formal training was brief; by 1891 he was already working as a commercial illustrator and newspaper artist. He would continue to illustrate throughout his career, and later became an important contributor to the socialist magazine The Masses during the 1910s. Sloan’s studies at the Pennsylvania Academy had lasted less than a year but during that time he met his friend and mentor Robert Henri and resumed his friendship with boyhood acquaintance William Glackens. Sloan never traveled to Europe, but in 1900 he was receiving critical and public attention as a painter in oils. In 1904 e moved to New York and soon became well known for his non-idealized views of the city’s street life and slums. In 1908 Sloan joined Henri in forming “The Eight,” a group of artists who sought to mount a protest exhibition against the conservative National Academy of Design.
Wolf Kahn (b.1927). Afterglow in Mexico, 1992. Oil on canvas, 44 1/8 x 61 ¼ in. Purchased with funds donated by the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation. Born in Stuttgart, Germany to wealthy Jewish parents, Hans Wolfgang Kahn displayed a talent for drawing from an early age. His family encouraged their son’s gifts through private lessons and exposure to their private art collection. With the rise of the Nazis, however, Kahn and his family suffered loss of employment, segregation, and physical assault due to their Jewish heritage. 1939, Kahn escaped Germany thanks to a humanitarian effort to save Jewish children. In 1956, he met Emily Mason, an abstract painter, whom he married two years later on a trip to Venice. This extended trip in Italy marked a transition in Kahn’s career. Inspired by the subtle beauty of Venice and the abstraction he saw in his wife’s painting, Kahn was motivated to paint simplified landscapes with a heavy impasto. His lifelong obsession with color established a vital new style of landscape painting that helped Kahn remain intensely engaged with the process of creation, not only in terms of formal innovation but also emotionally.
William Merritt Chase (1849-1916). “Venetian Balcony” (1913). Oil on canvas, 35 x 28 inches. Gift of the St. Joseph Art League. William Merritt Chase’s Impressionist influences are easy to recognize in this painting. Chase, who spent six years as a student in Munich, had a successful career as both a working artist and as a teacher that included instructing summer courses in Europe. During his final summer abroad in 1913, Chase painted Venetian Balcony. One of his students at this time was St. Joseph native Estelle Manon, who urged the St. Joseph Art League to purchase the work. This acquisition became the first piece in the collection that would become the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art.
Thomas Hart Benton ( 1889-1975). “Custer’s Last Stand” (1943). Oil on canvas, 42 x 48 inches. Purchased with funds donated by the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation. When Benton was a young boy living in Neosho, Missouri, he became fascinated with the poster Anheusher-Busch published of Custer’s last battle. In 1943, two years after he quit teaching at the Kansas City Art Institute, Benton produced this large oil painting based on the subject that attracted him during his childhood. The principles Benton taught his painting students are clearly at work here: the strongly modeled figures are obviously based on a preliminary clay model study, and each form in the composition is paired with a mirror-opposite form to balance it. Notice also that the cloud is in the shape of a buffalo to symbolize a major area of conflict during this time.
Stephen Scott Young (b. 1958). Quenton, 1983. Watercolor, 29 3/4 x 15 in. Inscribed verso: The last portrat - ”Quenton” 11 years old Sept. 1983 (c)1983 S. S. Young/St. Augustine, FL 61 Stanford St. Purchased with the funds donated by Mrs. Henry D. Bradley. Stephen Scott Young’s watercolor ‘Quenton’, the artist’s first painting to be purchased by a museum for its permanent collection, is a penetrating portrait of a young man, and a quiet depiction of life’s awkward passage from youth to adulthood.
Rembrandt Peale (1778-1860). George Washington, 1860. Oil on canvas, 35 ½ x 29 ¼ in.). Inscribed verso: Copy from my / Original Portrait of / Washington (1795) / Painted in my 83rd year / expressly for / Mrs. M. M.Phelps, Boston. / by / Rembrandt Peale / Philad. June 1860. Purchased with the funds donated by the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation. Rembrandt Peale was a United States Neoclassical Painter. Best-known for his meticulously crafted portraits, Peale was born into a family whose artistic pursuits were nurtured by their famous father– Charles Willson Peale, an esteemed portraitist, soldier, and naturalist. His father’s favorite student among several talented children, Rembrandt, at age seventeen, was allowed a sitting with George Washington as a result of his encouraging parent’s high praises. In 1823, the artist created an image that he considered the definitive portrait of George Washington, which he referred to as “The Standard National Likeness.” The Albrecht-Kemper portrait, painted during the artist’s 83rd and final year, is among the artist’s last efforts to multiply the number of Washington portraits.
Rembrandt van Rijn. Jacob Laments the Death of Joseph, 1633. Etching, 4 ½ x 3 1/8 in. (11.4 x 7.9 cm). Signed lower right: Rembrandt van Rijn. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Henry D. Bradley. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was a Dutch painter and etcher. He is generally considered one of the greatest painters and printmakers in European art history and the most important in Dutch history. His contributions to art came in a period that historians call the Dutch Golden Age. Rembrandt is one of art history’s greatest interpreters of the Bible. Rembrandt’s subject comes from the story of Joseph, the son of the Hebrew patriarch Jacob and Rachel. Jealous of Joseph’s privileged status as his father’s favorite, his half-brothers stripped him of his coat, threw him into a pit, and sold him to passing merchants, who took him to Egypt. The brothers then smeared Joseph’s coat with goat’s blood and took it Jacob, who recognized it and lamented, “It is my son’s robe. A wild beast has devoured him; Joseph has been torn into pieces.” In a masterful composition that effectively communicates the essence of the narrative, Rembrandt emphasizes Jacob’s agonized reaction to the presentation of the coat. The drama is enhanced by the rich light and dark contrasts, created through variations in the density of etched lines. While strongest in American art, the Albrecht-Kemper collection also contains significant examples of European art, especially prints.
Red Grooms (b.1937). “Bedtime for Rauschenberg” (1991). Oil on wood, 34 1/2 x 22 1/2 x 7 inches. Gift of the R.C. Kemper Charitable Trust. Copyright 1995 Red Grooms/Artists Rights Society, NY. Red Grooms rejected the abstract painting style that was emerging during the 1950’s in favor of more figurative work that often captures the humor of everyday life in both painting and sculpture. Bedtime for Rauschenberg is one of Grooms’s works that takes other artists as their subjects. Robert Rauschenberg is an artist best known for his “combines”, mixtures of painting, sculpture, and found objects. Here Grooms has placed Rauschenberg on top of one of the most famous of these combines, Bed (1955). Grooms both honors the creativity of his fellow artist and pokes fun at the idea of the laid-back genius.
Mary Cassatt (1844-1926). “Mother Looking Down, Embracing Both Her Children” (1905-08). Pastel, 36 1/4 x 29 inches. Gift of the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation. Mary Cassatt is best known for her images of mothers and children. In 1872 the Philadelphia-born artist settled permanently in France where she soon became associated with the group of avant-garde artists known as the Impressionists. Interested in light and spontaneity, Cassatt often used pastel because of the freedom it allowed without dealing with the lengthy drying time of paint. As a woman, Cassatt was limit by the social norms of the time that prevented a “proper” woman from accessing subject and locations frequently seen in the work of her male contemporaries—nude models, bars, and dance halls. Instead, she depicted the domestic sphere of families and homes more readily accessible to her.
Martin Johnson Heade. Field with Haystacks—Gray Sky (1874). Oil on canvas, 14 1/8 x 28 inches. Purchased with funds donated by the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation. This image of a New Jersey salt marsh hayfield is an example of a Luminist landscape. The quiet scene focuses on the effects of light, especially as it reflects off water. Scenes such as this provide a contrast with the work of Heade’s contemporaries such as Fredrick Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt. With those artists dealt with the dramatic ideas of Manifest Destiny, Heade utilized his folk art background to depict the tranquility and peace of ordinary scenes.
Ken Moylan (b. 1957). Lago di Como (Lake Como) (1995). Masonite, wood veneers, oil paint, and modeling paste, 43 x 31 x 2inches. Purchased with funds donated by the John and Maxine Belger Family Foundation. Born in the small mining town of Eveleth, Minnesota, Ken Moylan began to paint at the age of four. While at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, he participated in a work-study program that placed him in the woodworking facility, an in his spare time he trained himself in woodcraft techniques. Moylan’s distinctive creations combine the art of oil painting with the wood inlay technique intarsia, which involves hand-cutting and hand-sanding individual pieces of wood that are glued to a common backing.
Janet Fish (b. 1938). Cows, 1990. Oil on canvas, 56 x 50 in. (142.2 x 127 cm). Signed and dated verso : Janet Fish/ 1990. Purchased with funds donated by the William T. Kemper Foundation. Janet Fish is an American Contemporary Realist Painter. Born in Boston to a family of artists – her grandfather was a painter, her mother a sculptor, and her sister a photographer – Janet Fish grew up with an insider’s understanding of the art world. The painting Cows exemplifies Fish’s ability to create rich and sensuous images that proclaim America’s long-standing obsession with material objects. In a whimsical fashion, the artist combines various elements from her environment, blurring the distinction between real and represented objects, and between the traditional genres of still life and landscape.
Robert Henri. Dark Bridget Lavelle, 1927. Oil on canvas. 27 ½ x 20 in. (69.9 x 50.8 cm). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Leon H.Albus In memory of Mrs. John Albus. Portrait painting was central to the artistic practice of Robert Henri. He called his sitters “my people,” which suggests his close identification with and respect for the individuals he portrayed. Subsequent European travels introduced Henri to the realist paintings of Frans Hals, Diego Velazquez, Francisco Goya, and the early work of Edouard Manet. Under their influence, he abandoned his early impressionistic style and adopted a dark, low-keyed palette and used quick and active brushstrokes to capture the vitality and immediacy of his subjects. Henri founded the American Ashcan School. The Ashcan School was a small group of artists who sought to document everyday life in turn-of-the-century New York City, capturing it in realistic and unglamorized paintings and etchings of urban street scenes. Henri painted not only Americans but also the citizens of such foreign countries as the Netherlands, Spain, and Ireland. Even at their most abstract, Henri’s portraits remain motivated by a love of humanity, and unfailingly convey his deep insight into and respect for the dignity and beauty of the common person.
George Inness. A Sunset (c. 1879). Oil on canvas, 16 ¼ x 24 inches. Purchased with funds donated by the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation. George Inness, born and raised in the New York City area, was one of the major landscape artists of the nineteenth century. In contrast to many artists of the period who focused on American scenes and styles, Inness was heavily influenced by European old masters. This painting also shows the influence of the Barbizon School working in France at mid-century. The loose brushstrokes and color palette are characteristic of this influence. This painting also reflects Inness’s growing religious devotion to the connections between nature and the spiritual world.
Fitz Henry Lane. Christmas Cove, Maine, 1858. Oil on canvas, 19 x 26 ½ in. (48.3 x 67.3 cm). Signed and dated lower right: F.H. Lane. 1858. Purchased with funds donated by the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation. Fitz Henry Lane (long known as Fitz Hugh Lane) was an American Hudson River School Painter. In paintings such as this one, Lane revealed a lifelong fascination with tranquil nature. Lane was born in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Lane lost the full use of his legs while still an infant, when it is believed he contracted polio. He was forced to walk with crutches for the rest of his life. Due in part to this disability, Lane spent the majority of his youth in Gloucester observing and recording in countless sketches the sea and the miles of shoreline he would come to know well. Although well-respected during his lifetime, Lane faded into obscurity soon after his death in 1865. It is only within the last quarter century that he has earned the reputation of our first native maritime painter of real stature.
Fairfield Porter. Portrait of a Girl (1964-65). Oil on canvas, 72 ¼ x 45 inches. Purchased with funds donated by the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation. Fairfield Porter was an active member of the New York art scene in the mid-20th century, during a period best-known abstract and nonrepresentational art. Porter created images of his family, friends, and surroundings using a loose brushstrokes and carefully constructed settings influenced by French painters of the early part of the century. The subject of this painting, Porter’s daughter Katherine is seated in chair that is starkly divided from the exterior world. The attention to architecture in many of Porter’s paintings reflects the influence of his architect father.
Deborah Butterfield (b. 1949). Untitled (1992). Bronze, 15 1/4 x 24 x 36 inches. Purchased with funds donated by the Kemper Foundations. This sculpture is an example of Deborah Butterfield’s interest in using abstracted animal forms to engage the viewer. A lifelong interest with horses influences her choice of subject. Using a variety of materials, Butterfield has created pieces that retain the original forms of the materials while depicting both the exterior and interior lines of the animal. This work in Albrecht-Kemper collection is cast in bronze, a durable medium for a work that appears instead to be a fragile mixture of natural materials like leaves and branches that also suggest the muscles, bones, and skin of the horse itself.
Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) was a self-taught photographer and ethnographer famous for his massive, twenty-volume encyclopedia, The North American Indian (1907-30). Intended collectively to record in words and pictures the living traditions of every Indian tribe on the continent north of the Mexican border and west of the Mississippi, each of Curtis’s volumes was devoted to a single tribe or group of related or geographically adjacent tribes, and featured a text illustrated by approximately seventy-five plates. Additionally, each volume was accompanied by a portfolio of around thirty-five folio-sized photogravures, also sold separately in the form of reprints. Curtis’s subjects were presented in a tightly cropped view and with a shallow depth of field that blurs the surroundings, concentrating attention on the individual’s face. He intended his photographs not simply to document but to glorify the native inhabitants of the American West.
Wi-Jun-Jon, An Assinneboin Chief, 1844 Purchased with funds donated by the Kemper Foundations. George Catlin’s life (1796-1872) is a fascinating tale of a self-taught artist. He was trained as a lawyer in Philadelphia, but his calling was to become a painter. In 1828, upon seeing a delegation of stately western Indians he declared “nothing short of the loss of my life, shall prevent me from visiting their country, and becoming their historian.” He yearned to produce images of what he thought was a vanishing culture. Ultimately, his trips to the Great Plains to paint American Indians cost him a life with his wife and children. The first white artist to travel deep into the American West and record the appearance and customs of the native peoples, Catlin spent six years in the 1830s painting Indian subjects and gathering artifacts for his huge “North American Indian Gallery,” which he toured through North America and Europe in the late 1830s and early 1840s. The North American Indian Portfolio, a group of hand-colored lithographs based on his original paintings, and originally to have numbered four volumes, was intended to generate income, but the cost of the publication proved too high for the popular market, and Catlin lost money on the venture. Only the first volume, subtitled Hunting Scenes and Amusements of the Rocky Mountains and Prairies of America, was published. (Catlin’s Indian Gallery also proved too expensive to maintain, and eventually ruined the artist financially.)
Billy Schenck (American, B. 1947). When Horses Dance, 1995. Oil on canvas. Gift of the artist