Back to Summer 2008 ARTnews Retrospective  

100 Years Ago

Professor James H. Hyslop, secretary of the American Society for Psychical Research, has chartered a boat at New Bedford, Mass., to investigate reputed proof of the alleged control of Frederick L. Thompson, of New York, by the late Robert Swain Gifford, the artist. He will make a trip to Naushon Island, in Buzzard’s Bay, to identify the scene of a picture by Thompson entitled “The Battle of the Elements,” said to have been painted while under Gifford’s control. Thompson communicated with Dr. Isaac K. Funk recently, saying that Gifford’s voice directed him to take up the latter’s work and go on with it. It is alleged that he paints in a semi-trance.
—“Spirit Directs Painter,” July 11, 1908

75 Years Ago

For in both American and European art circles there are so many eager prophets, earnest publicists and such a constant flux of new movements and influences, that many are bewildered and the gay innovator is often mistaken for genius.
—“The Carnegie International,” August 12, 1933

50 Years Ago

Willem de Kooning went to the Metropolitan recently to see the new installations of American paintings. “They called us drippers and paint-slingers. I don’t think our pictures look violent any more. The big Pollock seemed very lyrical and calm.

“Going through the other rooms, Rembrandt and Rodin are near each other. Although they’re centuries apart, in the museum they seem part of the same thing.

“The idea that art can come from nowhere is typically American—I call it ‘painting made out of John Brown’s body’—like Frank Lloyd Wright, and you can quote me.”
—“de Kooning,” by Thomas B. Hess, Summer 1958

25 Years Ago

During the past several years, Michael Graves has become one very busy architect. With major completed projects, such as the much-publicized Portland (Oregon) Public Office Building—which faced attacks from modernist critics—and major pending projects, including the Whitney Museum addition in New York, Graves has emerged as the star of postmodernist architecture. His pastel-colored works, filled with historical allusions to everything from Classical to Art Deco forms, and his consistently articulate and determined support of them, have made Graves a subject of great curiosity, outrage and adulation.
—“Unquiet Graves,” by Michael Kimmelman, Summer 1983