Member Talk: Surface Tension—A Virtual Collection Tour with David Breslin
Thurs, July 9, 2020
6 pm
Jacob Lawrence, War Series: Casualty - The Secretary of War Regrets, 1947. Tempera on composition board, overall: 24 1/4 × 16 3/16 in. (61.6 × 41.1 cm) Image: 20 1/16 × 15 7/8 × 1/8 in. (51 × 40.3 × 0.3 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Mr. and Mrs. Roy R. Neuberger 51.16. © The Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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Online, via Zoom
All members
Join David Breslin, the Whitney’s DeMartini Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Initiatives, for a virtual tour of the exhibition The Whitney’s Collection: Selections from 1900 to 1965. The presentation will focus on paintings that particularly resonate during this time of crisis and opportunity.
Breslin will discuss the various ways artists have used stillness as a decoy—from choices in subject matter and color palette to the way they handle paint. Charles Sheeler, Elsie Driggs, Horace Pippin, Andrew Wyeth, Edward Hopper, Kay Sage, Jacob Lawrence, and Norman Lewis embrace stillness in their paintings paradoxically, to suggest the turbulence beneath the veneer of calm.
According to Breslin, "Looking—like painting—is a form of training and world-making. If all isn’t what it seems, perhaps we can learn to see differently and make the world we want."