LESSON 4: AMERICAN AND JAPANESE COLONIZATION PERIOD

ACTIVITY 1:
Research: State at least 3 works produced by the 2 artists from the American
Period and Japanese Period given below. Make a diagram using the 4 Key
Questions: WHO (artist), WHAT (artwork), WHEN, (date) and WHY
(definition). Include pictures of the Artist and its artwork. Save your work in
PDF file.

WHO

Fabian Dela Rosa

WHAT
Athenaeum Portrait The Skater Catherine Brass Yates

(1796) (1782) (1793)

The Athenaeum Portrait, “The Skater” by Gilbert Catherine Brass Yates is an

also known as The Stuart depicts a man oil-on-canvas painting
Athenaeum, is a gliding effortlessly forward undertaken in 1793–94 by
with arms crossed over his the American artist Gilbert
unfinished painting by
Gilbert Stuart of former
United States President
George Washington.
Created in 1796, it is
Stuart's most notable
work. The painting
depicts Washington at
age 65, about three years
before his death, on a
brown background.[1] It
served as the model for
the engraving that would
be used for Washington's
portrait on the United
States one-dollar bill.
A corresponding portrait
of Martha Washington is
also known as the
Athenaeum Portrait,[2][3]
and is exhibited near the
painting of her husband
at the Boston Museum of
Fine Arts. The Athenaeum
is Stuart's most famous
work. He started painting
the Athenaeum in 1796, in
Germantown,
Philadelphia (now a
neighborhood within
Philadelphia). The
painting is oil on canvas
and depicts only
Washington's head and
neck, painted when he
was 65 years old (about
three years before his
death in 1799) on a brown
background. The rest of
the painting is unfinished.
The frame was made by a
frame maker, picture
dealer, and entrepreneur
named John Doggett.
chest in typical
eighteenth-century skating
form. The skater wears a
dark elegant full-skirted
coat, a white cravat, a gray
fur lapel, a tan glove, and
silver buckles on the hat,
breeches, and shoes. HIs
stylish hat is tilted to show
his face while his head is
slightly lowered. A low
point of view enhances the
dramatic impression.
Behind the skater is a
winter landscape
composed of distant
skaters, trees, and a far-off
London skyline that
includes the twoers of
Westminster Abbey. The
Skater’s figure divides the
canvas into halves. To the
right, a large bare tree
dominates the composition
with a few stationary
figures. While the left side,
the distant skaters are
depicted in motion, as are
the darker winter clouds
over London.
Stuart,[1] depicts Catherine
Brass Yates, the wife of
Richard Yates, a New York
merchant. The painting
shows Catherine Brass
Yates, the wife of Richard
Yates, a New York
merchant;[2] it was painted in
oil on canvas in 1793–94.[1]
Stuart painted a portrait of
Richard in the same period.[3]
Timothy Cahill, the editor of
Art Conservator magazine
considers that the Portrait of
Mrs. Richard Yates is
"regarded as among the
finest American portraits
ever made". On returning to
the United States from
England and Ireland in 1793,
Stuart found that the type of
portrait in demand differed
from those he had painted in
Europe. The Yankee
merchants' taste was for
realism, so he portrays
Catherine Yates, with her
bony face and appraising
glance, as too busy with her
sewing to take time off to
pose for the artist. Using
different paint mediums and
paying meticulous attention
to detail, he employs a
variety of techniques for the
fabrics, sewing implements,
wedding ring, skin tones,
and fingernails.

Pumpkin
(1990)
While polka dots are Kusama’s
most recognizable motifs,
pumpkins are a close second.
They have cropped up in
drawings, paintings,
sculptures, and installations
throughout her career. The first
of these oddly shaped
squashes appeared in a work
WHO
Yayoi Kusama
WHAT
Infinity Mirror Room
Fireflies on Water
(1965)
In 1965, Kusama erected the first of
her now-famous immersive
environments. Infinity Mirror Room
– Phalli’s Field (Floor Show) fused
her interests in repetition, sexual
exploration, psychology, and
perception by filling a roughly
25-square-meter mirrored room with
a thick carpet of soft, twisting
Accumulation No. 1.
(1963)
Accumulation is a sculpture
made by the artist Yayoi
Kusama around 1963, and is
part of an ongoing series of
sculptures by the same name
that the artist began in the early
1960s. The armature of this
particular sculpture is a wooden
armchair, measuring about 3
Kusama made in 1946, a full 10
years before she relocated to
the United States and began
making the work that would
catapult her to fame. It
depicted the kabocha—a kind
of pumpkin used extensively in
Japanese cooking—rendered
in the late-19th century
Japanese painting style of
Nihonga. With typical fervor,
she painted the form over and
over again, becoming lost in its
grooves and bumps. “I would
confront the spirit of the
pumpkin, forgetting everything
else and concentrating my
mind entirely on the form
before me.…I spent as much as
a month facing a single
pumpkin,” she later recalled.
phalluses camouflaged in the
artist’s signature polka dots.
Visitors were encouraged to enter
the room and interact with the total
environment, where their reflection
repeated endlessly against a field of
odd sensual forms so pliable and
lumpy, they looked alive. The
experience, as curator Catherine
Taft has written, created a kind of
“psychosexual encounter with one’s
own body and image.”
Other artists took note of the heady
effects of Kusama’s first Infinity
Room on the viewer—and on the
avant-garde 1960s art world. Since
1965, Kusama has produced over 20
“Infinity Mirror” rooms, including
one for the Japanese Pavilion at the
1993 Venice Biennale. In recent
years, they’ve become the major
draw of Kusama retrospectives,
transporting viewers into a
kaleidoscopic black hole of
shimmering dots, while also
providing the perfect backdrop for a
selfie sure to inspire lots of likes.
feet high by 3 feet wide by 3 feet
deep. This style of the armchair
has curved legs in the front,
which make it look a bit more
elegant and ornate. All over the
surface of the chair–on the seat,
sides, and back–Kusama has
affixed a series of small to
medium-sized phallic-shaped
protrusions. Indeed, Kusama
has termed these puffy
projections: "phalluses", an
identification that, when
combined with a domestic
object like an armchair, carries
both sexualized and gendered
stereotypes.
For this particular
Accumulation, the protrusions
range in size from as small as a
fingerling potato to as large as a
loaf of bread. These extensions
appear almost pillowy and soft,
and in fact were produced by
the artist individually sewing
and stuffing each one, before
attaching it to the surface of the
chair.