BEST AMERICAN ART by Alexandra Jopp

Red House, Autumn. Carl William Peters is best known as a poet-painter of winter landscapes that he composed directly from the fields. By Alexandra A Jopp Carl William Peters, “one of the best kept secrets in the history of twentieth century American art,” was born to Frederick and Louisa Peters in a Rochester, N.Y., community of working-class German immigrants on Nov. 14, 1897.1 Peters studied anatomy, perspective and illustration at Rochester’s Mechanics Institute of Technology while working for a sign painter and serving as an apprentice to a theatre scene design company. He then went to the famed Art Students League in New York where he learned landscape painting. Peters concentrated on reproducing the ordinary places of America early in his career. He painted winter scenes and produced landscapes of his beloved Genesee Land with a rare “spirit of place” that drew critical acclaim during a long and prolific career that lasted until his death at 82. Peters could be compar...

--> Flowers, Italy, 1931, Phoenix Art Museum.   An Italian-born member of the American avant-garde, Joseph Stella became famous for radiant, Futurist-influenced paintings of New York and particularly the Brooklyn Bridge By Alexandra A. Jopp --> Joseph Stella is an elusive figure in the history of American art. His unpredictable, almost capricious nature was shaped by idiosyncratic cultures of East and West. His art is like his personality––contradictory, intense, and ambiguous. It is an immense kaleidoscope, with everything in it fantastic, hyperbolic, joyful. He was consumed by turbulent enthusiasm and joyous visions, but he was saddened by everyday routine, and he searched all his life for “peace, serenity, and transcendence of the mundane, the superficial and the ephemeral.”1 Taking a particular interest in Futurism, he developed a remarkable skill for drawing, and his work contrasted sharply with the style of his contemporaries. The in...