LEE KRASNER
1908-1984, New York
Krasner was an American abstract expressionist painter, with a strong speciality in collage. Although Krasner's marriage to the well-know Jackson Pollock overshadowed her artwork for some time, she is now seen as a key transitional figure within abstraction who connected early-20th-century art with the new ideas of postwar America. |
MARK ROTHKO
1903-1970, New York, Latvia
born Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz, was an American abstract painter of Latvian Jewish descent. He is best known for his color field paintings that depicted irregular and painterly rectangular regions of color, which he produced from 1949 to 1970. Also, he lived here in the Pacific Northwest for a bit. He emigrated to Portland Oregon from Russia, before moving to New York. |
THE WOMAN IN GOLD
Klimt titled the portrait simply Adele Bloch-Bauer, but when the Nazis seized the painting and displayed it in the early 1940s, they removed her name and called her The Woman in Gold instead.
"They took away her identity," Staggs says. Without a Jewish name, the work became appropriate to show in Hitler's Third Reich. "So it is a betrayal on the grandest scale." |
Gustav Klimt's 1907 portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer was seized by the Nazis at the outset of World War II. A film starring Helen Mirren now tells the story of Adele's niece, who fought to recover her family's paintings more than a half century later. |
THE DURA-EUROPOS SYNAGOGUE
The synagogue at Dura-Europos is sometimes compared to the city of Pompeii. "Although Jews of the Roman Empire did not worship idols as did their pagan contemporaries, biblical stories appeared on the painted wall sof synagogues and probably also in painted manuscripts, though no illustrated Bible of this period survives. God (YHWH, or Yahweh in the Old Testament), however, never appears in the Dura paintings, except as a hand emerging from the top of the framed panels."
Gardner, Helen, 1878-1946. Gardner's Art through the Ages. New York :Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975. |