Get Away

 

(April 2, 2021) – Omaha, Nebraska

Pandemic!

Cooped up longer than ever. Twelve and one-half months hanging out (sometimes almost literally) at the hacienda or at the store/shop/office.

The routine monotonous. Other than seeing my doctors, I traveled from home to work to the post office to picking up groceries to getting gas and back home again with minimal human contact. Continually being inside the season made little difference.

My time at home was with Susan watching television, reading, streaming Netflix, Amazon Prime, and You Tube art history videos.  My kids and grandson, Aaron traveled twice to Sioux Falls for restorative reprieve visits at the pen. I saw my brother (who lives less than two miles away) infrequently at his shop or mine, zoomed meetings with the State Economic Advisors and my book club, had in person and ultra-spaced meetings with the Siouxland Libraries Board of Trustees, Wednesday art lessons with my art guru and had special Sunday coffee, with my pre Covid Sunday coffee partners super spaced at my office.

Vaccines done and after a month waiting period, on a nice Spring like day Susan and I took a Day escape to Omaha to the Joslyn Art Museum. The change in scenery was joyful, though slightly less than my first Pfizer shot.

Kudos to the Joslyn. Their public health precautions were exemplary, admission was limited and subsequently spaced by timed reservation, masks and distancing were required, and sanitizer widely available throughout the museum. The little more than two hours we were at the spacious galleries, I never sensed there were more than fifty persons in the entire site.

Returning to the Joslyn for the first time in three years I was excited to see my friends some old and some new; Karl Bodmer, George Catlin, Seth Eastman, Alfred Jacob Miller, Charles Marion Russell, Frederic Remington, Newell Conyers Wyeth, Marsden Hartley, Robert Henri, George Bellows, Thomas Hart Benton, and Grant Wood.

Seeing a Robert Henri work for the first time, I visually understood what the Art Spirit Henri expounded to his students. The painting is “Portrait of FI.” Exquisite!

Joslyn specializes in art of the Upper Missouri River and have the largest collection of Karl Bodmer and the third largest collection of Alfred Jacob Miller.

The marquis exhibition was Revisiting America – The Prints of Currier & Ives. Displayed were about sixty selections chosen from the Joslyn’s extensive collection of six hundred Currier & Ives’ prints. The massive collection was a gift to the museum in 2016 by Fortune 500 conglomerate Conagra Brands.

The exhibit was right in my wheelhouse, 19^th Century American Art meets American History!

Currier & Ives began in 1834 by Nathaniel Currier. In 1857 James Merritt Ives joined the publishing house as a partner. The company had an enormous influence on American culture. The many prints commissioned by the enterprise covered a broad range of subjects on American life during the 19^th Century.

Worth noting, Mr. Currier and Mr. Ives never physically traveled west to the frontier and their pieces consistently reflected their pro Union sympathy and beliefs in conservatism and American goodness.

The prints whether published in magazines or sold as prints covered wide reaching topics including, Sails Steam and Speed, The Sporting Life, The Frontier, America in War and Peace, Humor, and The Civil War and the American South.

Many subsets of the above topics were included. Particularly of interest to me were America as the land of opportunity, the conflicting contrast of Manifest Destiny and growth of the American City.

I particularly appreciated the subtle use of humorous detail in several of their prints.  Among the artists presented were Fannie Palmer, James Butterworth, Louis Maurer, Eastman Johnson, and Arthur Fitzwilliam Tate.

The prints I really liked were: “The Great Chicago Fire” (wonderful colorization), “The Great River Race, New Orleans to St Louis”, and “Arguing the Point”,

My favorite print, representing the settlement of the frontier, was “Across the Continent Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way” by Fannie Palmer.

The exhibit “Revisiting America” aptly labeled my first escape from the pandemic.