By 1959 Neri and [Joan] Brown were sharing a large studio on Mission Street near the Embarcadero in San Francisco, where Neri began making life-size sculptures like Joan Brown Seated. Neri shaped the original sculpture in plaster, an inexpensive material he liked for the speed and ease with which it could be worked and reworked. The surface of the figure is rich with the marks of the artist’s hand and tools. Here, coated in Neri’s signature whit…
…e interconnected volumes of the body, and his intimacy with his model. We see this in the earliest drawing shown here: Brown is pictured sitting casually in a classroom, her right arm stretched fluidly across her body, her shoulders gently curved as she slumps forward. By 1959 Neri and Brown were sharing a large studio on Mission Street near the Embarcadero in San Francisco, where Neri began making life-size sculptures like Joan Brown Seated. Ner…
…ce that day in Paris, Hunk, 91, and Moo, 87, have always approached collecting art as a team. “We’ve all read the same books, we’ve all looked at the same pictures, ” Moo said, “and that’s how you get to see things the same way. Hunk and I have never asked one another to give up and say, ‘I’m going to buy it whether you like it or not.’ There’s too much good art to be had to argue about…
A project of the Anderson Collection at Stanford University Hosted by art historian and the associate director of ITALIC at Stanford, Kim Beil, the micro-video series “Up Close: One Painting Tours with Artists” focuses on a single object in the Anderson Collection, sparking dialogue with a guest artist. This project is made possible by a grant from Stanford Arts and the Anderson Collection at Stanford University. Artist Rebekah Goldstein explor…
Up Close: One Painting Tours With Artists Barrier Hosted by art historian and the associate director of ITALIC at Stanford, Kim Beil, the micro-video series focuses on a single object in the Anderson Collection, sparking dialogue with a guest artist. Kim spoke with artist Davina Semo about Vija Celmins’ Barrier. Explore the Up Close Series “The images are not from observations of nature, but are ’found images’ fr…
…y created in plaster, a material considerably easier to work with and more forgiving than marble. The small size allowed Neri to see at a glance the effects of changes to the overall composition. The objects on view here are bronze casts of the plaster originals, treated with Neri’s signature Alborada patina, a white coating with yellow glazes. The bronze faithfully replicates and fixes the fugitive texture of plaster: at once wet and dry, drippi…
Peter Voulkos was among the first American artists to explore the sculptural possibilities of clay. Influenced by abstract expressionism and Japanese pottery, he departed from the regular forms of wheel-throw vessels to push clay toward expressive rather than utilitarian ends. Known as an innovative sculptor, he attracted students to his workshop at the University of California, Berkeley, where he set up the ceramics department in 1959. The work…
…y created in plaster, a material considerably easier to work with and more forgiving than marble. The small size allowed Neri to see at a glance the effects of changes to the overall composition. The objects on view here are bronze casts of the plaster originals, treated with Neri’s signature Alborada patina, a white coating with yellow glazes. The bronze faithfully replicates and fixes the fugitive texture of plaster: at once wet and dry, drippi…
…y created in plaster, a material considerably easier to work with and more forgiving than marble. The small size allowed Neri to see at a glance the effects of changes to the overall composition. The objects on view here are bronze casts of the plaster originals, treated with Neri’s signature Alborada patina, a white coating with yellow glazes. The bronze faithfully replicates and fixes the fugitive texture of plaster: at once wet and dry, drippi…
…ough he resisted being categorized as a “California artist,” Richard Diebenkorn spent the majority of his career on the West Coast. In the fall of 1966, Diebenkorn moved from Berkeley to Santa Monica, where he found an art studio in Ocean Park, a gritty neighborhood along the oceanfront that was a hub of artistic activity. It was here that Diebenkorn painted the 145 paintings in his Ocean Park series, which he developed over the course of twenty…
Russian-born American sculptor Saul Baizerman is best known for his labor-intensive, hand-hammering technique on the copper medium to create graceful relief sculptures, such as the beautiful female figure here named Largo-May. For each of these sculptors, Baizerman would arduously hammer a cold copper sheet on both sides, allowing a cocoon-like image to appear in relief. Through this practice, Baizerman aligns himself with the strenuous exertion…
![Japanese Dancer Series No. 12 [Makiko], 1980](https://anderson.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/MN.1980.DWG_.045-212x300.jpg)
Makiko In the late 1970s Neri began making regular trips to Carrara, Italy. He established a studio there in 1981 in order to readily access marble from the city’s famed quarries. Neri’s practice was profoundly affected by his proximity to the sculptural traditions of Western civilization, from the art of ancient Etruscans and classical antiquity to the haunting figures of Italian modernists Alberto Giacometti and Marino Marini. In Carrara Neri…
…y created in plaster, a material considerably easier to work with and more forgiving than marble. The small size allowed Neri to see at a glance the effects of changes to the overall composition. The objects on view here are bronze casts of the plaster originals, treated with Neri’s signature Alborada patina, a white coating with yellow glazes. The bronze faithfully replicates and fixes the fugitive texture of plaster: at once wet and dry, drippi…
Makida III, a carving of [Makiko] Nakamura’s head in veined Carrara marble, suggests a synthesis of Eastern and Western artistic traditions. Its larger-than-life scale and placid expression evoke the contemplative mood of temple statuary found in the Eastern tradition. The polished stone is partially masked with gestural strokes of bright pink-and-green paint used to set off her traditional Japanese hairstyle. When the figure is viewed from behi…
Joan Brown Neri met the painter Joan Brown at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) in 1957, when both were taking a painting class with Elmer Bischoff, a central figure of the Bay Area Figurative movement. A romantic and artistic partnership ensued, and Brown became a frequent subject of Neri’s figure studies. His drawings and sculptures of Brown reveal an extraordinary sensitivity to the interconnected volume…
Mark Tobey is considered a leader of the Northwest School, a group of artists working in the Seattle area who were influenced by both the nature of the Pacific Northwest and East Asian philosophy. In his late twenties, Tobey became fascinated by haiku, Japanese and Chinese calligraphy, and mysticism, and he subsequently converted to the Baha’i World Faith. He believed that there could be no break between nature, art, science, religion, and one’s…
…ntemplation. A leading practitioner of Color Field painting, Rothko arrived at his signature format, represented here by Pink and White over Red, by the late 1940s. Rectangular fields of white and red hover weightlessly over the surface of the canvas. In contrast to many of his peers—like Jackson Pollock, who poured pre-mixed paint directly onto the canvas—Rothko achieved his luminous, shifting swaths of color by adeptly layering thin washes of p…
Rothko once said: “I paint large pictures because I want to create a state of intimacy. A large picture is an immediate transaction; it takes you into it.” Untitled (Black and Gray) belongs to the final series of paintings Rothko created before committing suicide in 1970. Painted in the wake of an acute illness, the work has a somber palette and stark composition that have long been attributed to the artist’s depressed mental state. Here the fie…
…Kooning’s “late style”, a period that began around 1980 and continued until the artist stopped painting in 1991. Here, we see a move away from the aggressive handling and heavy application of paint, as seen in Woman Standing—Pink, to one that appears more lyrical and fluid. The emphasis seems to be on the rhythm of color, line and form shown silhouetted against a toned white field. In speaking about de Kooning’s work from this period, the noted c…
…y created in plaster, a material considerably easier to work with and more forgiving than marble. The small size allowed Neri to see at a glance the effects of changes to the overall composition. The objects on view here are bronze casts of the plaster originals, treated with Neri’s signature Alborada patina, a white coating with yellow glazes. The bronze faithfully replicates and fixes the fugitive texture of plaster: at once wet and dry, drippi…
