Muscarelle Museum Events

This calendar presented by Muscarelle Museum

[PAST EVENT] Norman Lewis, Ad Reinhardt, Adolph Gottlieb, Dorothy Dehner: Our Pictographic Era

April 17, 2023
5pm - 6pm
Location
Washington Hall, Room 201
241 Jamestown Rd
Williamsburg, VA 23185Map this location
Access & Features
  • Open to the public
  • Registration/RSVP
Norman Lewis
Norman Lewis

Andrianna Campbell-LaFleur joins us from Yale University for our second talk in the spring Muscarelle Explorations series, Modern Masters at the Margins.

Painters such as Norman Lewis, Ad Reinhardt, Adolph Gottlieb and Dorothy Dehner looked to notational stand-ins for meaning. The stick figures and simplified marks were graphic interfaces developed to be capable descriptors of more complex language systems. Following the research of post-structuralist anthropologists such as Claude Levi-Strauss, Zora Neale Hurston and Margaret Mead in the 1940s, artists paired these ideas with instinctive line-making. For them these rational and id-based notation systems were places of universal sympathetic convergence. As explored in the writings of Francis O’Connor, Anne Gibson, and as Dr. Campbell-LaFleur will revisit in this talk, the pictograph involved the interests of a society exploring technology and systems theory in the 1930-1950s. The talk will explore abstract expressionist artists less seduced by unintelligibility and less inspired by surrealist chimeric marginalia while moving to a future of immediacy in the field of pictorial skeuomorphic understanding.

This event will take place in Washington Hall 201. Parking will be reserved for attendees along James Blair Drive. Street parking is also available along Richmond Road.

Contact

Julie Tucker, [[jstucker]]