American Art

More than a decade ago, in a darkened lecture hall at Pomona College, art historian Frances K. Pohl projected a slide of Winslow Homer's Civil War painting "Soldiers From the Front." She presented the 1866 image as an example of a traditional theme: a confrontation between the vanquished and the victor after a war. Pohl told her students how Homer adhered to conventions and how he deviated from the norm. Then she issued a challenge: "Look at the image. What do you see?"

Corinthian columns, classical pediments, a sculptural charioteer, flaming caldrons--the opening scenes of "American Visions," Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes' eight-hour television series on the history of American art, which has its debut Wednesday on PBS, are filled with triumphal images. He is not, however, touring the monuments of ancient Greece, fountainhead of the Western democratic ideal with which the United States first imagined itself into being.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has laid off three employees in a move to cope with a countywide fiscal crisis. Additionally, Michael Quick, senior curator of American art, has resigned, reportedly in an effort to avoid being laid off. The museum on Thursday morning notified the employees of their termination, effective immediately. Their museum declined to reveal their names.

American Expressionism Art and Social Change 1920-1950 Bram Dijkstra Harry N. Abrams/Columbus Museum of Art: 272 pp., $60 * This is a marvelous, passionate and irritating book that proposes to retrieve a once-powerful movement in American painting from the rubbish heap of art history. That lost Depression-era movement has been sloppily labeled Social Realism by the clerks of academic art criticism, with their iron need for categories.

What the father-and-son team of John and Alan Lomax -- white guys -- did for American music in the 1930s when the two went around the backwoods of the South recording black musicians and authentic blues, another father-and-son team of white guys, William and Paul Arnett, has done for contemporary American art, identifying and collecting since the 1970s vernacular art made by black artists in the South.

BENTONVILLE, Ark. - To meet Gilbert Stuart's "George Washington," Norman Rockwell's "Rosie the Riveter," Andy Warhol's "Dolly Parton" and hundreds of other artworks less famous and more subtle, first fly to XNA. That's right, Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport. Then drive 20 miles north, through farmland, forest and suburbs, to the home of the planet's largest retailer. That's right, Bentonville. On Central Avenue, if it's autumn, you'll probably roll past 100-year-old houses under a dense canopy of fall colors.

April Fool's Day is four months away, but someone has clearly gotten an early start. The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., is the victim of an apparent email hoax linking founder and Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton with workers from the big-box retailer. The email sent Wednesday said the museum would close its doors Friday in sympathy for Wal-Mart workers who are planning demonstrations over the holiday weekend. A museum spokeswoman said that all information in the release is false.

Jenny Holzer's first solo show in Los Angeles in more than 20 years - only her second to date - is a taut mini-survey consisting of works dating back to the late 1970s. The “truisms” contained in LED signs, benches and plaques scattered throughout the gallery at L&M Arts, as well as in a trio of Gobo light projections that appear on the exterior walls after dusk, will come as a surprise to almost no one, so central have they become to the story of American art over the last quarter-century.

Detroit industrialist Richard Manoogian has collected a number of companies under his corporate banner, and it seems he collects American art the same way--with an enthusiasm and appetite for the best. An exhibit drawn from his vast holdings, "American Paintings from the Manoogian Collection," is on view for the first time at the National Gallery of Art, capturing what Gallery Director J. Carter Brown calls the essence of "a true collector." "He is more than a lender, more than an owner of art," said Brown.

The 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy will be marked next year with numerous commemorations around the country. As part of the observances, the Dallas Museum of Art will host an exhibition of the works of art that were installed in the president's suite at his hotel during his 1963 trip. Kennedy stayed at the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth the night before he was fatally shot on Nov. 22. The hotel's presidential suite had been decorated with artworks by Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Thomas Eakins, Pablo Picasso and others, all of which will be brought together for the first time for the exhibition, the museum announced Wednesday.