Joan Mitchell:

Flower I, 1981.

Untiled, 1992.

One Hit Wonders of the Art World – A Paper by David W. Galenson

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER): Working Paper Series

One Hit Wonders: Why Some of the Most Important Works of Modern Art are Not by Important Artists | David W. Galenson (Working Paper 10885, 2004)

Abstract:
How can minor artists produce major works of art? This paper considers 13 modern visual artists, each of whom produced a single masterpiece that dominates the artist’s career. The artists include painters, sculptors, and architects, and their masterpieces include works as prominent as the painting American Gothic, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D. C. In each case, these isolated achievements were the products of innovative ideas that the artists formulated early in their careers, and fully embodied in individual works. The phenomenon of the artistic one-hit wonder highlights the nature of conceptual innovation, in which radical new approaches based on new ideas are introduced suddenly by young practitioners.

Link: http://www.nber.org/papers/w10885

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
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13 One Hit Wonders

 

1.  Théodore Géricault

(Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1818-19)

 

 

2.  Antoine-Jean Gros

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(Baron Antoine-Jean Gros, Napoleon in the Plague House at Jaffa,
1804)

 

 

3.  Gustave Caillebotte

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(Gustave Caillebotte’s, Paris Street: Rainy Day,1877)

 

 

4.  Paul Sérusier

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(Paul Serusier, The Talisman/Le Talisman, 1888)

 

 

5.  Vladimir Tatlin

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(Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the Third International, 1920)

 

 

6.  Meret Oppenheim

Meret Oppenheim, Object, 1936

Meret Oppenheim, Object, 1936

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

7.  Grant Wood

Grant Wood, American Gothic

(Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1934)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

8/9.  Richard Rogers & Renzo Piano

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(Richard Rogers + Renzo Piano, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1969-1974)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

10.  Richard Hamilton

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(Richard Hamilton, Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, 1956)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

11.  Gerrit Rietveld

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(Gerrit Rietveld, Schröder House (Dutch: Rietveld Schröderhuis), 1924)

 

 

12.  Judy Chicago

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(Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974-79)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

13.  Maya Lin

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(Maya Lin, Vietnam Way Veteran Memorial, 1982)

Pierre Bonnard, La Sieste (L’atelier de l’artiste), 1900. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest 1949.

The model was Marthe Boursin, whom Bonnard had met in 1893; they lived as husband and wife but did not marry until 1925. Marthe is shown in a pose made famous by a celebrated classical sculpture, Hermaphrodite, which Bonnard may have seen in the Louvre during his studies there at l’ Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

We are in the room and looking down at the woman. With her head and shoulders in shadow, Marthe seems relaxed and perhaps asleep — she also appears to be slipping off the bed. The strong diagonal of the table on the right continues the line of Marthe’s upper left leg. The table appears tipped up, covered with a clutter of unstable objects — creating an ambiguous spatial illusion. Note how the stripes on the wallpaper on the right do not recede into the corner of the room, thereby flattening the space.

While the small white dog having a siesta on the floor beside the bed is facing away from the woman, the shape of its body echoes the shape of her back, and its front legs are stretched out in much the same way as the woman’s arms. Bonnard often introduced images of animals unexpectedly into his paintings.

(Article authored by the NGA Education department)

Source: National Gallery of Australia – http://nga.gov.au/bonnard/Detail.cfm?IRN=54754

Currier Museum of Art | Browse Online Collection

http://www.currier.org/collections/browse-collections/

The Currier Museum of Art’s permanent collection contains about 13,000 American and European works of art, most of which can be viewed online along with interpretive text and zoomable images. 

The Currier Museum of Art is an internationally renowned art museum located in Manchester, New Hampshire. Its collection features European and American paintings, decorative arts, photographs and sculpture, including works by Picasso, Monet, O’Keeffe, Wyeth, and LeWitt…

Collections: 

Other Features:

Words of Artistic Wisdom [and Criticism]: Robert Hughes

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The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It’s not something that committees can do. It’s not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It’s done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.
― Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New

“Robert Hughes has been called the ‘most popular art critic in the country,’ and to have given Time magazine its ‘only consistently good writing’ in recent years (Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 4/5/93)…Hughes is probably best known for his strong stance against what he called the ‘commodification and hyping the market’ of the art world in 1980s…The artworks Hughes admires the most are those than embody a sense of fiction, mystery and history. Specifically, Hughes looks for artists who are unafraid to become deeply personal and even autobiographical with their canvases, to bring something intimate to the work. ” (Source: The Art Story – http://www.theartstory.org/critic-hughes-robert.htm

References

  • The New Yorker (2012 August 07): Postscript: Robert Hughes – http://nyr.kr/1130na3
  • NYT (2012 August 16): Robert Hughes, Art Critic Whose Writing was Contentious, Dies at 74 – http://nyti.ms/112YQRf
  • TIME (2012 August 07): The Art of Being Critical: Robert Hughes (1938–2012) – http://ti.me/ZtFqe6
  • TIME Magazine: Complete Index of Robert Hughes’ Writings for TIMEhttp://ti.me/1132GtF
  • World Socialist Website (30 August 2012): Art History with a capital A and H: Art critic and social historian Robert Hughes (1938-2012) – http://bit.ly/1132jzn
  • The Shock of the New: 8 part documentary about development of modernism from the Impressionists through Warhol (1980)
    1. Episode 1: The Mechanical Paradise
      Episode 2: The Powers That Be
      Episode 3: The Landscape of Pleasure
      Episode 4: Trouble in Utopia
      Episode 5: The Threshold of Liberty
      Episode 6: The View from the Edge
      Episode 7: Culture as Nature
      Episode 8: The Future That Was
      The New Shock of the New (2004)

    The Whitney Museum of Art Collection – Works Online

    website: http://whitney.org/Collection

    The Whitney’s collection—comprising more than 19,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, films, videos, and new media by more than 2,900 artists—contains some of the most significant and exciting work created by artists in the United States during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

    The Museum’s rich holdings of realist and modernist work, Precisionism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, and Minimalism are particular strengths of the collection. In addition, the Museum has collected work by individuals who have shaped recent artistic practice but defy easy categorization by movement or medium. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the founder of the Museum, focused her collecting efforts on living artists, and this emphasis has been a guiding principle of the collection for the past eight decades. An appreciation of the areas of inquiry, working methods, and material exploration of today’s living artists guides our current acquisitions.

    The Whitney Museum of Art Collection – Works Online

    The Whitney Museum of Art Collection – Works Online

    website: http://whitney.org/Collection

    The Whitney’s collection—comprising more than 19,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, films, videos, and new media by more than 2,900 artists—contains some of the most significant and exciting work created by artists in the United States during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

    The Museum’s rich holdings of realist and modernist work, Precisionism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, and Minimalism are particular strengths of the collection. In addition, the Museum has collected work by individuals who have shaped recent artistic practice but defy easy categorization by movement or medium. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the founder of the Museum, focused her collecting efforts on living artists, and this emphasis has been a guiding principle of the collection for the past eight decades. An appreciation of the areas of inquiry, working methods, and material exploration of today’s living artists guides our current acquisitions.

    The Whitney Museum of Art Collection – Works Online