This week I am sharing German Expressionist Prints: the Marcia and Granvil Specks Collection: Milwaukee Art Museum, published by Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI, and Hudson Hills Press, Inc., Manchester Vermont, 2003. This book was published to accompany a traveling exhibition of a selection of prints from the Specks Collection, which was on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2004.
This collection, which lives at the Milwaukee Art Museum is one of the most significant collections of German Expressionist prints in the United States. This book features over 500 color reproductions of the works as well as essays, a catalogue of the prints, and artist bios.
For artists and art students like myself, catalogues such as this one are incredible resources for broadening our visual vocabulary and offering inspiration and broader understanding of our place in art history. The artworks in these kinds of books may be thousands of miles away, stored in back rooms of museums or in private collections. Many of the works in books such as this one are not even accessible online.
These books may be costly to acquire but many libraries, like UWM’s, have large collections of books like these that are free for you to check out and peruse.
Lucky for us the more than 450 prints in the Marcia and Granvil Specks Collection have their own gallery in the Milwaukee Art Museum where they are on continuous rotation. You and I are also able to see these works at the Herzfeld Photography, Print, and Drawing Study Center by appointment!
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Flemish Baroque painter Maria Theresia van Thielen was born #OTD (7 Mar 1640 – 11 Feb 1706). Some of her works have likely been misattributed to her father, but fortunately she signed this one!
Maria-Theresia Van Thielen (Flemish, 1640–1706)
Still Life with Parrot, 1661
Oil on canvas
21 × 27 in. (53.34 × 68.58 cm)
Milwaukee Art Museum
The parrot looks like the subspecies of Turqouise-fronted Amazon (Amazona aestiva aestiva) native to eastern Brazil - perhaps an import from the Dutch Brazil colony?
recent visit to Milwaukee Art Museum, specifically for a show called
50 Paintings
I spent some time considering the exposed canvas edges of several unframed entrants, wondering if these drips, drabs, dabs and washes and smudges are intentional, accidental, accidentally intentional.
Are these resting places during the creative process? Are these secrets whispered into the ears of the paintings by the paint themselves? Are these extra paintings? Are these dumb mistakes and the artist would be pissed off that you would even point them out? Is this the peek behind the curtain where you find an emperor wearing new clothes? Is this what it feels like to fall off the edge of a flat world?