Jane Stuart, George Washington, oil on canvas, not dated.
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Jack MacNider

 

In an age of mass media most of the thousands of images we see of the president are photographs or film; however, the significance of the office means that a formal painted portrait will be a work that conveys not just what the president looks like, but something of the person's character and the import of our nation's highest office.

The MacNider's portrait of our first president is by Jane Stuart, Jane was the daughter of Gilbert Stuart, the artist who painted the most famous image of Washington. Gilbert Stuart made several portraits of Washington during his lifetime. The most famous is the unfinished Wadsworth Athenaeum portrait done from life in 1796. Stuart realized it was improbable he would have another opportunity to paint a likeness of the president, so he kept the canvas with only the face completed, and used it as his model for further lucrative reproductions. It has since served as a direct model for commissioned copies to meet the enormous demand for Washington's portrait and has been duplicated innumerable times, most notably on the one-dollar bill. Today it is a secular icon; the most familiar portrait in America.

Jane Stuart felt great admiration for her father. As his assistant, she was often given the task of painting backgrounds as well more menial work, such as grinding colors. With this experience she was in a good position to understand her father's style and make faithful replicas of America's most famous portrait. Jane Stuart had her own studio in Boston, and after her father's death in 1828 continued a modestly successful portrait practice.

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Robert Rauschenberg, Soviet American Array VII, Intaglio with photogravure in color, 1988-91.
Museum Purchase

 

The recent death of Robert Rauschenberg has highlighted his position as one of the most influential figures in avant-garde art in the second half of the twentieth century. A native of Port Arthur Texas, he entered the University of Texas to study pharmacology, but after a stint in the Navy studied art at the Kansas City Art Institute, the Académie Julian in Paris, Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and the Art Students' League in New York. His earliest works were minimalist monochromatic paintings, but in the mid-1950s he began to incorporate three-dimensional objects into what he called 'combine paintings'. The best-known example is of these is Monogram, which features a stuffed goat with a rubber tire around its middle. Other objects he used included Coca-Cola bottles, fragments of clothing and quilts, electric fans, and radios.

In the 1960s, Rauschenberg returned to working on a flat surface and was particularly active in the medium of silk-screen. He was interested in combining art with new technological developments, and was active in forming EAT (Experiments in Art and Technology), an organization to help artists and engineers work together. The print in the MacNider's collection is from his project of the 1980s, ROCI (Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Exchange), and includes his own photographs of New York and Russia. This undertaking fostered cultural exchange in cities outside the usual contemporary art circuit and reflected his broad interest in social causes.

Rauschenberg's other work included theater design and choreography and involvement in "happenings". Along with his friend, Jasper Johns, he is regarded as one of the most important figures in the move away from the Abstract Expressionism that dominated American art in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

"I am, I think, constantly involved in evoking other people's sensibilities. My work is about wanting to change your mind. Not for the art's sake not for the sake of that individual piece, but for the sake of the mutual coexistence of the entire environment."

Robert Rauschenberg

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Chuck Close, Marta (detail), Fingerprint/Silk Collè Etching, 1986.
John and Mary Pappajohn Endowment Fund Purchase

 

Chuck Close has worked since the early 1970s within a carefully defined practice focused exclusively on monumental portraiture. Starting with a source photograph, Close carefully transposes the image to a canvas or other surface using a grid. Referencing painting, drawing, photography, collage and printmaking, the resulting works are hybrid objects that merge manual and mechanical processes and explore the boundaries between the personal and the social, the subjective and the systematic, the abstract and the representational.

After a rare spinal artery collapse in 1988 that left him with partial use of his arms and legs, Close paints with a brush strapped to his hand. Rather than ending his career, "the event", as he calls it, has pushed his work further into a looser, freer style he was beginning to explore before it occurred.

Close created Marta, the print in the MacNider's collection, by measuring off the grid he uses as the foundation of all his portraits, making marks on a metal plate with his fingerprints, and etching these into the plate with acid. Ink was then rolled over the surface and into the grooves, paper was laid on top of the plate, and the image was transferred to the paper. The tan background of Marta is silk glued to the paper during the printing process.

 

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- Maria Martinez

The MacNider Museum's collection of American ceramics includes three pieces of San Ildefonso black-on-black pottery by Maria Martinez and members of her large extended family. Maria, as she came to be known, achieved world fame for the technique she and her husband, Julian, developed for black pottery with both matte and glossy finishes.

A member of the Native American Tewa tribe, Maria was born at San Ildefonso Pueblo about 25 miles northwest of Santa Fe. By the time she married Julian Martinez, she was a respected potter and had exhibited her work at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. Maria and Julian initially made pottery in the polychrome (multi-colored) style popular with San Idelfonso potters in the late 1800s, for use in the pueblo and for the tourist market that flourished with the completion of the railroad to Santa Fe in 1880. Maria shaped and polished the pots; Julian gradually mastered the art of painting them.

Known as one of the pueblo's most skilled potters, Maria was asked in 1908 by Dr. Edgar Lee Hewett, director of the Museum of New Mexico, if she could create reproductions of ancient black pottery uncovered at nearby archeological sites. Around 1918, the couple perfected a technique for producing distinctive black-on-black pottery, in which black designs are visible against a shiny black background. Maria hand-coiled and carefully burnished the pots, while Julian painted the designs in clay slip, carrying on their long collaboration. After Julian died in 1943, other family members continued to work with Maria. She remained active as a potter and a member of her community until her death in 1980.

Maria is also credited with helping to establish the practice of signing Pueblo pottery in the 1920s. Trilingual in Tewa, Spanish and English, Maria signed her work in a variety of ways to appeal to her audience. The large black-on-black plate in the MacNider's collection is signed Marie and Julian. On the base of the small bowl she has signed Maria Poveka, her name in the Tewa language of San Ildefonso. The remaining piece of San Ildefonso pottery in the museum's collection is by Anita Martinez, Maria's granddaughter.

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