LGBTQ+ Month

July 2, 2021
Uncategorized

In honor of LGBTQ+ Pride Month, the Springfield Museums highlight three remarkable works that exemplify the ideal of strength and beauty in diversity.

Marie Laurencin shared time and thoughts with Pablo Picasso and many Cubists and Fauvist artists in early 20^th century Paris. Throughout her decades of painting, drawing, and printmaking, Laurencin developed her own unique brand of abstraction. She simplified forms; narrowed her palette to grey, pink, and pastel tones; embraced curvilinear, undulating forms; and primarily chose women as subject matter. Her biographer Jose Pierre wrote that Laurencin reflected her personal life in her art and presented a style he called “queer femme with a Gallic twist.”

Although this print is not currently on view, it represents the ingenuity, beauty, and excellence that defines the art collections found at the Museums.

Marie Laurencin

French, 1885-1956

Head of a Young Woman, undated

Lithograph

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Abraham Kamberg

42.D8

Carlos Collazo (Puerto Rican, 1956 – 1990) was one of Puerto Rico’s leading contemporary artists. Working across a wide range of media, he expressed himself as a painter, draftsman, ceramicist, assemblage artist, graphic artist, and designer. During his brief career, he mastered a range of styles including photorealism and abstract art with a figurative emphasis. Paintings made in the last years of his life are highly personal images of self-exploration.

In a statement made a year before his death, Collazo said: “Art is important because it is freedom, expression, and vision. It’s everything . . . my work nurtures from my life experiences.”

Self-Portrait XI is from a series of twenty-nine self-portraits Collazo painted between 1988 and 1989. This larger-than-life-size portrait is startling, due to the artist’s penetrating direct gaze and the intense unnatural colors he used. Palm trees in a tropical landscape reminiscent of Puerto Rico, a reference to the artist’s cultural identity, are featured in the background against a starry evening sky. The nighttime setting and unrealistic colors give the scene a dreamlike or subconscious contest and add to the psychological intensity of the paintings.

This portrait is currently on view in the Contemporary Gallery at the D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts.

Carlos Collazo

Puerto Rican, 1956-1990

Self-Portrait XI, 1989

Acrylic and oil on canvas

Museum Purchase from Contemporary Art Fund

91.01

Innovation—thinking outside the box, experimenting with techniques, and trying something never tried before—is an important and recurring factor in the creation of masterpieces. These can be scientific masterpieces (like a new medical machine) or artistic masterpieces like this lithograph by Robert Rauschenberg (American, 1925-2008). Rauschenberg and his friend Bill Goldston, who was a master printer, decided to try their hands at using a photomechanical camera to create prints. In the 1970s, photography involved developing film and printing onto photosensitive paper in a darkened room. The two disregarded standard darkroom practices such as refreshing the chemicals needed to develop the film. “Instead, they wholeheartedly embraced chance and experimentation in their proofing sessions,” said art reviewer Josh Pazda. The result was a larger-scale print than ever before.

Many of Rauschenberg’s works include references to various modes of transportation. This print is no exception and depicts a bright red bicycle, poised at an unusual angle as if about to lift off the ground or ascend a steep hill. In fact, the title of this work echoes the name of a hill in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina where the Wright Brother’s took their initial flight.

This print is not currently on view due to the light sensitivity of paper, but exemplifies the innovative excellence embraced by Rauschenberg and other imaginative artists whose work pointed forward to new directions in art.