Collection Record
Images
Metadata
Artist |
Kushner, Robert (American, b. 1949) |
Title |
Quince |
Date |
2014 |
Medium |
Acrylic Paint/Gold Leaf/Oil Paint |
Material |
Linen |
Technique |
Oil, acrylic and gold leaf on linen |
Height (in) |
84.000 |
Width (in) |
60.000 |
Credit line |
Gift of Dr. Harold F. Daum |
Notes |
Robert Kushner is one of the founders of the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s. The P & D movement arose in defiance of the tenets of Modernism and the austerity of Minimalist and Conceptual art. P & D artists were inspired by the traditional ornamentation of everyday objects and architecture. They focused on ways to blend the motifs and methods of non-western decoration with European painting traditions. For Kushner, the goal was to paint compositions that encompassed more than beauty, alone: "Can I imbue my flower paintings with the power, wonder, and sheer beauty that I have always experienced while looking closely at flowers? Can I make these paintings remind us that every blossom is a memento mori, a brush with death?" The two paintings by Robert Kushner at the Daum were painted during a recent summer sojourn in Maine, where the artist was inspired by the hardy perennials that were in bloom during his stay. Since the 1980s, Kushner has embraced flowers as his primary subject matter. His work combines representational likenesses with abstract formal values in a way that straddles pure decoration and modernist formalism. Kushner draws from a broad range of influences, including Islamic and European textiles, the paintings of Henri Matisse, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Pierre Bonnard, and traditional Japanese screen painting. His work is well regarded for its effective arrangement of marbleized grounds, solid bands of color, and shimmering passages of metal leaf that act as foils to his open, calligraphic drawing style and expressive paint application. |
Object ID |
2015.03.01 |
Object Type |
Painting |