Edwin Dickinson’s paintings are swimming in the ocean of visual sensations and have just barely started to crawl up onto the land and become “things” that the brain can identify, and therefore, exert hegemony over.
As all portrait artists know, there is something solemnly ceremonious about the full-profile position. We do not make eye contact—that being somehow beneath the authority of the subject—just as the set mouth seems to be not just momentarily, but eternally, silent.
Art, At the League
“I’ve Been a Person Other People Always Wanted to Paint or Photograph.”
Feb 1, 2021, 11:00 AM
The story and relationship behind two of the best-known works in the Art Students League of New York’s permanent collection.
As Lucia Fairchild sat drawing in class, she must have been flush with the good fortune of her talent, her friendship with John Singer Sargent, and all the promise her future held.
Robert Philipp was—and this may be a defining characteristic of many League instructors—an iconoclastic traditionalist, well enough versed in the conventions of art to take them as a point of departure.
George Bridgman created mural-sized drawings, illustrating his technique of using geometric forms such as boxes, cylinders, and triangular wedges to outline the fundamental shapes and movements of the human body.