Sunday, August 29
The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center’s summer lecture series at The Fireplace Project concludes on Sunday, August 29, at 5:00 pm with Philip Eliasoph, an authority on Magic Realism and egg tempera painting. His illustrated talk, “Swept Away: Re-thinking Realist and Abstract Painters in the Wake of Ideological Hurricanes,” will examine the period from 1944-1954, when force 3 hurricanes slammed into the Hamptons and American painting was irreversibly transformed.
The Great Atlantic hit on September 15, 1944, and ten years later Carol on August 31 and then Edna on September 11. Meanwhile an aesthetic storm about the directional current of art was raging in the artists’ studios and watering holes, and the pages of the art press. Eliasoph has been a champion of the “lost generation” of realists who were swept away by the rising tide of Abstract Expressionism. He will argue that we are now capable of viewing Hopper and Rothko, Wyeth and de Kooning, Rockwell and Pollock as equally representative of the mid-20th century zeitgeist.
Eliasoph is a professor of Art History at Fairfield University. His doctoral dissertation, “Paul Cadmus: Life & Work,” was the first revisionist look at the 1930s social satirist, whose homo-erotic imagery pushed him off the mainstream agenda. Eliasoph organized the artist’s only retrospective and published a groundbreaking catalog on Cadmus’ career in 1981. He was a consulting producer for the award winning film “Paul Cadmus: Enfant Terrible at 80,” and won the CINE-Golden Eagle for documentary film making for “Robert Vickrey: Lyrical Realist,” both broadcast on PBS. Currently he serves as a commissioner for the Connecticut Commission for Culture and Tourism, and as senior arts editor of VENU Arts Magazine in Connecticut.
The lecture will be held at The Fireplace Project, a contemporary art gallery at 851 Springs-Fireplace Road, just north of the Pollock-Krasner House. Admission is $5 ($4 for Pollock-Krasner House members). Reservations are not required.
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