Gregorio prestopino wife carrying
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Interview with Ben Shahn
Conducted bygd Forrest Selvig at the Artist’s home in Roosevelt, New Jersey. September 27, 1968
FORREST SELVIG: This is an interview with Ben Shahn in his house in Roosevelt, New Jersey, and the date is the 27th of September, 1968. The interviewer is Forrest Selvig.
BEN SHAHN: Well, you asked me about this town which must appear strange to you. The architecture fryst vatten fairly monotonous and the country fryst vatten flat. And all of my friends who live in Westchester or Connecticut abhor this flatness. And I almost began to apologize for it until the old man John Marin wanted to komma out here one day and he asked me exactly where it fryst vatten that we live, and I told him. And he said, oh inom used to go sketching there – which meant seventy years ago when I was a kid, you know. He said that’s beautiful country; it’s so flat. Now coming from an authority like that inom have something to defend here. Anyway, it was built as a subsistence homestead. That meant that a good bit of
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Review: WPA-era artworks at the Portland Art Museum
Joseph Stella's "Factories at Night"
If laughter is the best medicine, what do you say in an unemployment line?
The plump, frolicking fantasies of Francois Boucher in "La volupte du gout," the Portland Art Museum's big new exhibition of 18th-century French painting created under the largesse of Madame de Pompadour, are so honestly charming they might make you actually break out in giggles of delight. That was part of Pompadour's plan: She was creating a haven for her lover, King Louis XV, a place where he could escape the cares of governance and lighten his bouts with depression.
But just outside the entrance to the Pompadour show, halfway hidden in the hallway near the museum's permanent American collection, a mini-show suggests another way of dealing with depression --the Great Depression that, beginning in 1929, saw the global economy sink like a stone. The United States and the rest of the world did
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When art fought the Cold War: A touring exhibition recreates the CIA’s 1946 secret weapon that scandalised conservatives
In the 1990s, a long held suspicion was confirmed: the US Central Intelligence Agency secretly sent Abstract Expressionism and other forms of American art and music abroad in the 1950s and 1960s as part of a propaganda campaign to assert American cultural dominance in the Cold War era. The first chief of the CIA division spearheading that campaign stated why the operation had to be clandestine: “It was very difficult to get Congress to go along with some of the things we wanted to do—send art abroad… In order to encourage openness we had to be secret.”
Their certainty of government disapproval was based on experience. In 1946, the US State Department assembled an art collection with the intention of touring it internationally to demonstrate the freedoms America allowed its artists. One that would determine that, in the proud words of the Assistant Secretary of