More from the Krannert Museum

Old Kingdom

There's something wrong with this poor guy's chin, but otherwise this is pretty lively.

Robert Gwathmey (1903-1988)

Looks a bit stagely, as if it were a backdrop in a production of Porgy and Bess.

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617-1681)
"Christ after the flagellation"

According to the Krannert's website: "The understated manner in which Murillo treats this potentially dramatic scene is sometimes taken by critics as sentimentality."

But this scene feels far less sentimental than the other Murillos that I've seen.

I wouldn't mind meditating on this scene every day.

Alexander Helwig Wyant (1836-1892)

Reminding me of some Midwestern, pre-Impressionist landscapes - with a strong sense of a rugged land.

Some interesting reflections on this artist can be found here

Theodule Augustin Ribot (1823 - 1891)

I really like these domestic views before the invention of the electric light, where even a pan of fried eggs feels like a profound, deeply mysterious event.

Here's a detail of another painting of his that recently sold at auction for under $10,000.

Which looks like a bargain to me.

Eugène Boudin (12 July 1824 – 8 August 1898)
"The Cove", 1871

Hovsep Pushman (1877-1966)

I discovered Pushman at the Union League Club about 15 years ago and have loved him ever since.

His work belongs in the Art Institute, but he won't get there until it abandons its ideological committment to Modernism.

Nobody captures the spiritual quality of Chinese sculpture as well as Pushman.

My camera gave me two views of this painting - each with a different color scheme - and I can't remember which one is more accurate.

Guy Carleton Wiggins (1883-1962)

I suppose Wiggins traded in nostalgia, and I can't help buying into it.

This is how the big city felt to me on those wintry afternoons so very long ago.

Frederick Carl Frieseke (1874 – 1939)
"Girl with Earrings" 1917




I first discovered this painter at the Terra Museum (back before the widow Terra shut it down) He specialized in the sunlit, shadow dappled nude.

I love to enter his paintings, although, unlike the French Impressionists whom he admired, he never quite got around to treating all of his human features as forms.

George Inness (1825-1894)
"The Approaching Storm", 1893


Noticing that this was painted a year before he died, there was indeed an approaching storm.

And I like this painting much more than the fragmentary Inness which the Krannert was featuring beside some of its other fragments from other museums.

Finally, we have this fine Madonna, on long-term loan from the Metropolitan Museum (which has so many of them)

If only everything in the basements of major museums were also scattered around small, local museums like the Krannert.








(more to follow)