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Still Life

Blanche Lazzell

Date: 1919 (block cut), 1931 (printed)

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Object number: 1996.32

Text Entries: Blanche Lazzell was born ninth in a family of ten children in rural West Virginia in 1878. By 1905 she had earned a remarkable three college degrees, and would continue to enjoy being a student throughout her life, both in Europe and the United States; as late as her sixties she studied abstract painting with artist and teacher Hans Hoffman. Lazzell is best known for color prints like Still Life, pulled from a single wood block, a process developed in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1915. A woodblock print executed in the traditional, Japanese-inspired manner requires a different block for each color; in contrast, the more expedient "white line technique" or "Provincetown print" utilizes a single block whose carved shapes, each colored individually, are separated by a groove that produces a white line on paper. Lazzell produced very few figurative works, concentrating instead on exploring geometric cubism and the bright coastal colors of her adopted home of Provincetown both through still lifes and landscapes.

untitled [tea cup and lemons]

Pierre Daura

Date: 1921

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Gift of Martha R. Daura

Object number: 2000.15

Text Entries: The thirty-three paintings, drawings, and prints and one sketchbook in the Pierre Daura Study Collection represent a cross-section of this versatile artist's work and span his entire career. They demonstrate his abilities as a draftsman, painter, and printmaker in a variety of media, and highlight his concern for specific themes and subjects. The earliest work, <a href="http://collection.terraamericanart.org/objects/843">untitled [Boats in Harbor] (TF 2000.37)</a>, which may date to the artist's adolescent years, evinces a precocious sense of color and form along with an awareness of the then-current expressive emphasis on tactile paint and exaggerated hues. Similar qualities are evident in the latest dated work, <a href="http://collection.terraamericanart.org/objects/840"> untitled [Daura House] (TF 2000.11)</a>, in which angular planes and vivid brushwork superimpose a modernist sensibility on the medieval irregularity of the artist's home in the southern French town of St. Cirq-Lapopie, a lifelong source of inspiration. Other works attest to Daura's attraction to streetscapes and architectural subjects in his native Spain and in Paris. <a href="http://collection.terraamericanart.org/objects/807">Untitled [chimneys] (TF 2000.13)</a> and <a href="http://collection.terraamericanart.org/objects/808"> untitled [streetlights] (TF 2000.14)</a> of 1921, his economical renderings of Paris scenes, prophesy his involvement by the decade's end in the short-lived avant-garde group Cercle et Carré (Circle and Square), dedicated to a reductivist non-representational art based on geometry. Although Daura experimented with abstraction throughout his career, his art was fundamentally grounded in the truths he found in the visible world around him. Like many other early twentieth-century modernist artists, Daura worked out problems of composition and color in still life arrangements. The figure nonetheless remained central to his art, from intimate nude studies to the numerous bust self-portraits he created in the course of his career. The artist explored his own elegant features and penetrating gaze in the media of drawing <a href="http://collection.terraamericanart.org/objects/810 "> untitled [Daura] (TF 2000.16)</a>, engraving <a href="http://collection.terraamericanart.org/objects/823"> untitled [Daura with scarf] (TF 2000.28)</a>, and oil painting <a href="http://collection.terraamericanart.org/objects/846"> untitled [Daura, winter cap] (TF 2000.40)</a>. <a href="http://collection.terraamericanart.org/objects/826"> Un Observador de la 59 Brigada Mixta, Teruel, 1937 (TF 2000.31)</a> is his self-portrait as a military observer in a brigade of anti-Fascist fighters during the Spanish Civil War in 1937. Daura devoted many other portrait heads and figural compositions to recording the experience of individual fighters, and he created a series of powerful print images to express the horrors of the conflict for soldiers and civilians alike, as in <a href="http://collection.terraamericanart.org/objects/827"> CIVILISATION 1937: Bronchales Teruel, Facist Clean-up, Spain (TF 2000.32)</a> and <a href="http://collection.terraamericanart.org/objects/828"> CIVILISATION 1937: The Innocent Victims of Valdecuenca Teruel (TF 2000.33)</a>, two examples from the group ironically titled <1>Civilisation 1937. During World War II, by which time he had settled in Virginia with his American-born wife and their daughter, Daura made poster designs promoting the war effort on the home front, of which <a href="http://collection.terraamericanart.org/objects/829">untitled [Americans at Work] (TF 2000.34)</a> and <a href="http://collection.terraamericanart.org/objects/830">untitled [Remember Pearl Harbor] (TF 2000.35)</a> are examples. In Daura's paintings, form largely takes precedence over color, an approach born out in his tireless activity as a draftsman. Daura also was a prolific printmaker who experimented in virtually every medium of intaglio technique, often combining them for a variety of effects. In an untitled view of his own house <a href="http://collection.terraamericanart.org/objects/822">untitled [Maison Daura] (TF 2000.27)</a>, a picturesque medieval structure in the southern French town of St. Cirq-Lapopie, for example, he juxtaposed the delicate lines of etching and the soft, blurry tones of aquatint. Vivid contrasts of light and dark areas infuse drama into Daura's view of a Spanish town in <a href="http://collection.terraamericanart.org/objects/820">Asco - Spain (TF 2000.25)</a>. His use of formal means to energize his compositions is a unifying feature of the wide-ranging body of work Daura created in the course of his prolific career.

Seven Plums in a Chinese Bowl

Charles Demuth

Date: 1923

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Object number: 1992.4

Text Entries: Farnham, Emily. Charles Demuth: His Life, Psychology and Works. PhD dissertation, Ohio State University, 1959. Vol. 2, no. 697, p. 679. Sotheby's, New York, New York (Sale 6247, December 5, 1991): lot 90. Text and ill. (color), lot 90. Seven Plums in a Chinese Bowl, Charles Demuth. Collection Cameo sheet, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, July 1998. Ill. (black & white). Cartwright, Derrick R. and Paul J. Karlstrom. American Moderns, 1900–1950. (exh. cat., Musée d'Art Américain Giverny). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 2000. Text p. 18; fig. 4, p. 19 (black & white). Cartwright, Derrick R. and Paul J. Karlstrom. L'Amérique et les modernes, 1900–1950. (exh. cat., Musée d'Art Américain Giverny). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 2000. Text p. 18; fig. 4, p. 19 (black & white). Bourguignon, Katherine M. and Elizabeth Kennedy. An American Point of View: The Daniel J. Terra Collection. Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 2002. Text p. 172; ill. p. 172 (black & white). Bourguignon, Katherine M. and Elizabeth Kennedy. Un regard transatlantique. La collection d'art américain de Daniel J. Terra. Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 2002. Text p. 172; ill. p. 172 (black & white). Brownlee, Peter John. Manifest Destiny / Manifest Responsibility: Environmentalism and the Art of the American Landscape. (exh. cat., Loyola University Museum of Art, Chicago, Illinois). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for American Art and Loyola University Museum of Art, 2008. Text p. 34 (checklist).

Super Table

Stuart Davis

Date: 1925

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Object number: 1999.37

Text Entries: The son of two artists, Stuart Davis grew up with family friends such as John Sloan, George Luks, and Robert Henri. Davis enjoyed an art career that spanned five decades and by the early 1940s was acknowledged as an important figure in twentieth-century American art. Davis's formal art training began at the young age of sixteen when he enrolled in Robert Henri's newly opened school in New York. Three years later, five of his watercolors were included in the pivotal exhibition of modern art, the 1913 Armory Show. This show also initiated Davis's interest in European modernist movements. In particular, the work of Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh greatly appealed to Davis for their depictions embodied his ideal that even abstract art had subject matter. If Davis's work shows an influence of European art, it is always fused with American elements. In a list of items that determined his abstract paintings, for example, he included: "Civil War and skyscraper architecture; the brilliant colors on gasoline stations; chain-store fronts and taxicabs; the music of Bach; synthetic chemistry; the poetry of Rimbaud; fast travel by train, auto and airplane which brought new and multiple perspectives; electric signs; the landscape and boats of Gloucester, Mass.; 5 and 10 cent store kitchen utensils; movies and radio; etc." Super Table-a modern twist on the traditional still life-represents a pivotal stage in Davis's oeuvre, before recognizable subject matter is subsumed to form and color.

Pomegranate and Persimmons

Stanton Macdonald-Wright

Date: 1953

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Object number: 1996.40

Text Entries: Acton, David et al. A Spectrum of Innovation, Color in American Printmaking 1890–1960. (exh. cat., Worcester Art Museum). New York and London, England: W. W. Norton & Company and the Worcester Art Museum, 1990. Text pp. 202, 273; ill. no. 78, p. 203. Stanton Macdonald-Wright, A Retrospective Exhibition 1911–1970. (exh. cat., University of California Los Angeles Art Galleries). Los Angeles, California: Grunwald Graphic Arts Foundation, 1970. No. 116. [Note: the impression cited, from the artist's collection, is dated "1964," and could possibly be the same impression as what is now in the Terra's collection. Marilyn Symmes Survey, 2003.] Cartwright, Derrick R. and Paul J. Karlstrom. American Moderns, 1900–1950. (exh. cat., Musée d'Art Américain Giverny). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 2000. Text pp. 50, 61 (checklist); pl. 22, p. 50 (color). [specific reference to Terra print] Cartwright, Derrick R. and Paul J. Karlstrom. L'Amérique et les modernes, 1900–1950. (exh. cat., Musée d'Art Américain Giverny). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 2000. Text pp. 50, 61 (checklist); pl. 22, p. 50 (color). [specific reference to Terra print]