If You Like This, Try This
(Part 2)

Thanks to the popularity of our first If You Like This, Try This highlights tour, we decided to offer even more recommendations, and as usual, our curators were eager to suggest lesser-known works they think you might like.

The Old Guitarist and The Bewitched

One of the most iconic images of modern art, Pablo Picasso’s The Old Guitarist reflects his own struggles as a poor artist and his sympathy for the plight of the downtrodden.

During his Blue Period (1901-04), the artist restricted himself to a cold, monochromatic blue palette, flattened forms, and emotional, psychological themes of human misery and alienation. The elongated, angular figure of the blind musician also relates to Picasso’s interest in Spanish art and, in particular, the great 16th-century artist El Greco.

If you like The Old Guitarist, curator Caitlin Haskell thinks you should take a look at The Bewitched by Mina Loy.

The multitalented Mina Loy was an artist whose work both explored and transgressed movements such as Symbolism, Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism. Highly respected as a poet, she once wrote that “poetry is prose bewitched.” In her painting The Bewitched, Loy presents two anthropomorphic beings with long necks, whose faces gaze upward at the sky as they carry their snail shell homes on their backs. Loy had devised a new method of painting, using a mixture of sand, gesso, and plaster to simulate the gritty appearance of fresco. Rendered in a monochromatic blue palette, there is certainly a symbolist affinity in this surreal image.

Sky above Clouds, IV and Mount Washington

The monumental painting Sky above Clouds, IV was inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe’s experiences as an airplane passenger.

Around 1963, she started a series of paintings that attempted to capture the endless expanses of clouds she had observed when flying. Beginning with a relatively realistic depiction of small white clouds on a three-by-four-foot canvas, she progressed to more stylized images of the motif on larger surfaces and eventually ended up with a painting eight feet high and twenty-four feet wide. Perhaps this broad expanse expresses O’Keeffe’s lifelong love of travel; she even flew to Costa Rica at the age of 96.

If you like O’Keeffe’s clouds, curator Sarah Kelly Oehler recommends Mount Washington by Winslow Homer, a work that looks at clouds from the ground up.

Mount Washington is part of the White Mountains of New Hampshire, which for over a century have been celebrated by artists, travel writers, and naturalists for their majestic wilderness. It was common for painters in the mid-19th century to create romantic depictions of America’s untamed scenery, but by the time Homer arrived in 1868, the region was dominated by tourists and the comforts they demanded: grand hotels, railroads, and well-groomed trails for walking and riding. For Homer, this landscape was a stage for human activity rather than a sublime paradise. Unlike O’Keeffe’s sense of expanse, Homer’s clouds are captured on a small focused canvas just over two feet wide; less stylized and more wild-looking, they partially obscure the mountain peak from the travelers dismounting to climb to the top by foot.

City Landscape and Untitled

Although influenced by Abstract Expressionist artists in New York in the early 1950s, Joan Mitchell did not prioritize self-expression: her often exuberant abstractions were “about landscape, not about me,” she once explained.

The title suggests a relationship between the painting’s network of pigments and the nerves or arteries of an urban space. Unlike many of her contemporaries, who were dubbed “action painters,” Mitchell worked slowly and deliberately. “I paint a little,” she said. “Then I sit and look at the painting, sometimes for hours. Eventually, the painting tells me what to do.”

If you like Mitchell’s Cityscape, curator Giampaolo Bianconi suggests you take a look at Untitled by Tanaka Atsuko.

Atsuko was a Japanese avant-garde artist who belonged to a group known as the Gutai Art Association, which lasted 1954–72. The Gutai artists were reacting to changing norms in Japan after the end of WWII and are sometimes credited with creating some of the first pieces of performance art. Atsuko is perhaps best known for a piece entitled Electric Dress (1956), which consisted of over 200 lightbulbs painted in primary colors that she wore like a dress or kimono. She eventually developed the style of painting seen in Untitled, where vivid enamel circles are connected with dripped lines that resemble nerves or circuitry, an approach that is both abstract and contemplative.

Hartwell Memorial Window and Mirror

Presenting a soaring vista of an idealized view of Mount Chocorua, New Hampshire, the Hartwell Memorial Window is among the most complex stained-glass landscapes produced in the United States.

Commissioned by Mary Hartwell as a memorial in honor of her husband Frederick for the Central Baptist Church of Providence, the majestic scene was designed by Agnes F. Northrop at the height of her five-decade-long career at Tiffany Studios. This monumental 25-foot-high window is made up of 48 individual panels, some of which are two to five layers thick.

If you like this dazzling stained glass, curator Liz McGoey recommends a rare object from Tiffany’s glass and decorating company, one that couldn’t be more different from the window, both in terms of scale and intent: a mirror.

mirror and detail

Where the window is monumental and public, made to fit the scale and aesthetics of a church, the mirror is human-sized and intimate, used by a person in the privacy of their home. Although Tiffany is best known for leaded glass windows and lamps, artists like Clara Driscoll, Joseph Briggs, and many others also creatively arranged and mounted fragments of the company’s signature, iridescent Favrile glass into, among other things, luxurious objects for the home. The intricate design and lustrous quality of lotus blossoms circling the looking glass are testament to the artistry and technical skill of the firm’s collaborators. Even better, you can see yourself reflected in it.

Face Mask (Ngady Mwaash) and Female Caryatid Drum (Pinge)

The ngady mwaash mask honors the role of women in Kuba life. It portrays a woman but, like other masks in Africa, is worn and performed by a man.

The elaborate geometric designs on this Kuba mask were created with pigment, glass beads, and cowrie shells. The most popular appearance of ngady mwaash is in a pantomime about the Kuba kingdom’s creation, where the ngady mwaash dances together with the mwaash ambooy mask, representing Woot, the culture hero and original ancestor of the Bushoong, the central group of the Kuba people, and the bwoom mask, who is alternatively identified as a prince, a commoner, or a Pygmy. Identified as the sister and wife of the king, ngady mwaash honors ideal womanhood. Dressed in an elaborate costume, the mask character performs in graceful and sensuous dances at funerals for deceased men of the nkaan initiation society.

If you like this face mask, curator Costa Petridis recommends this female caryatid drum, known as a pinge.

Made by woodcarvers of the Senufo people of Cote d’Ivoire in the 1930s or early ’40s, this tall drum comprises a seated image of a woman on a four-legged stool with a drum on top of her head. The drum, embellished with bas-relief designs depicting people, objects, and animals alluding to the knowledge and power of diviners, celebrates women’s prominence in Senufo society, where they act as family founders and spiritual mediators. Likely owned by a family of considerable rank and wealth, this particular drum may have been played by a woman during commemorative funerals for members of the influential all-female societies known as Sandogo and Tyekpa. Tyekpa is responsible for maintaining social order and cohesion, while Sandogo women act as diviners and mediate between humans and spirits.

Nighthawks and Desert Forms

One of the best-known images of 20th-century art, Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks depicts an all-night diner where three customers, all lost in their own thoughts, have congregated.

Although inspired by a restaurant Hopper had seen on Greenwich Avenue in New York, the painting is not a realistic transcription of an actual place. Still, as viewers, we are left to wonder about the figures, their relationships, and this imagined world. About the image, the artist recollected, “unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.”

If you like Nighthawks, curator Sarah Kelly Oehler thinks you might like Desert Forms by Hughie Lee-Smith.

Here, Hughie Lee-Smith conjures an unsettling scene: the stormy blues of the sky, the rocky terrain, and the unknowable relationship between the walking woman and the distant man. Like Nighthawks, this painting inspires questions: Why are these two figures in such an unforgiving space? Will they meet? What will they say to each other? Anonymous and disconnected, the figures face an austere existence—evocative, perhaps, of the human condition amid a turbulent modern world. Lee-Smith attributed the visual disconnection to the sense of alienation he felt as a black man in the United States: “Unconsciously it has a lot to do with a sense of alienation … and in all blacks there is an awareness of their isolation from the mainstream of society.”

Topics

• Collection
• Perspectives
• From the Curator
• Modern Art
• Contemporary Art
• Arts of Asia
• Arts of America
• Arts of Africa
• Architecture and Design