One of the most popular pieces at the Brauer Museum of Art is Georgia O’Keeffe’s Rust Red Hills, which was painted in 1930. It is the artist’s magnum opus, and it serves as a living testament to the vision and foresight of the museum’s first director, Richard Brauer. For the museum’s permanent collection, he made a 1962 acquisition of a painting by the artist. The price was low when it was first sold because there was less demand for American art, and people were still learning to value O’Keeffe’s achievements and contributions. The Brauer family has a prized possession in their collection: the dramatic painting Rust Red Hills, which represents the New Mexico scenery that so inspired the artist.
A collection of artists who work together toward a certain goal or adhere to a particular aesthetic for an extended period of time is said to have started an art movement. Precisionism was the first truly indigenous contemporary art movement in the United States, and its influence was crucial to the development of American Modernism (Martin & Jacobus, 2014). Inspired by Cubism and Futurism, Precisionism tried to bring order back to the visual arts while simultaneously praising the skyscrapers, bridges, and factories that had come to characterize the modern American landscape. Precisionism, which used precise, precisely defined mathematical forms, focused on themes of industry and modernity in the American environment and drew influence from European modernist creative movements, including Cubism, Purism, and Futurism. Although many Precisionist artists looked to Europe for artistic inspiration, others were reluctant to do so.
One of the first creative movements associated with painting is art nouveau, and it describes a decorative style that was fashionable in both Europe and the United States during the years 1890 and 1910. (Martin & Jacobus, 2014). Mainly manifested in architecture and the visual arts, this movement sought to build a new aesthetic via the use of sinuous, asymmetrical lines based on organic, complicated forms. The classical design was another school that put a focus on symmetry and the aesthetic value of classical forms. This work of art is influenced stylistically by a focus on accuracy. U.S. precisionist art emerged in the wake of WWI as a distinctive expression of American modernism (Martin & Jacobus, 2014). Artists of the Precisionist movement, inspired by Cubism, Purism, and Futurism, stripped their themes down to their bare geometric essentials, eliminated any extraneous details, and commonly used planes of light to create a sense of intense focus and recall the smooth, shiny surfaces of machines. With their slight wriggling, the hills give off an air of life. The artist’s love for the American Southwest inspired this work, which is among her favorites. The Brauer Museum of Art presently owns the building. However, it is sometimes leased out to other organizations for exhibits.
The landscape style best describes this piece of artwork. This is supposed to be a picture of the outdoors. During the early stages of photography’s development, artists used landscape paintings to depict the local environment. This style was ideally suited to the modernist emphasis on pinpoint accuracy. The reason for this is that artists were able to accurately depict the scene they were gazing at without exaggerating any of the elements, whether artificial or natural. This artwork brilliantly captures the arid landscape that Georgia O’Keeffe experienced.
References
Martin, F. D., & Jacobus, L. (2014). Humanities through the Arts. McGraw-Hill Education. Web.
Silberman, R. (2018). Cult of the Machine: Precisionism and American Art. Web.