Works in this section define themselves by the conviction of the artists’ deep regard for expressing injustice, and on some level, hope for a fair and just world. For example, Larry Rivers bridges the painterly gestures of Abstract Expressionism with the cool distance and emphasis on photographs, print processes, and combining materials of the Pop artists, but with a political slant. Black Revue from the Boston Massacre portfolio epitomizes his interest in using acts of imperialism by British soldiers to comment on events 200 years later during the VietNam war and the Civil Rights movement. So he is able to link Crispus Attucks, a half Black, half Native American stevedore and the first American colonist killed in the Revolutionary War, 1770, with James Meredith, the youthful Black student activist shot three times by a white supremacist in 1966 on Meredith’s solo “March Against Fear” from Memphis to Jackson. Compare this with Kathe Kollwitz’ equally powerful Death Seizes a Woman, in which her simplified but forceful style of drawing with a lithography crayon, makes a graphically important statement about mothers struggling to protect their children amidst dire conditions of poverty and deprivation.
M. Jume | Harold Anchel | Kathe Kollwitz | Robert E. “Bob” Fletcher | Karl Schmidt-Rottluff | Albert James Webb | Larry Rivers | Gilles Peress
M. Jume
Family Group, c. 1978
Carved wood
Gift of Elizabeth McFall, 2008.10.2
Harold Anchel
Family Portrait, c. 1935-1945
Lithograph
Gift of Audrey McMahon, P237
Kathe Kollwitz
Death Seizes a Woman (Tod packt eine Frau) from the series Death (Tod), 1934
Lithograph
Unknown donor, 97.4.4
Robert E. “Bob” Fletcher
Mississippi Children, 1968
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Queens College Library, 2010.00.14
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
Three at the Table (Drei am Tisch), 1914
Woodcut on paper
Gift of Frederick Zimmerman, 60.31
Albert James Webb
Proposition #1, c. 1935-1939
Etching on paper
Gift of Queens College Library, P528
Larry Rivers
Black Revue (from the Boston Massacre portfolio), 1970
Serigraph
Gift of George Shore, 81.92
Gilles Peress
Iran, Tabriz, Demonstration in a stadium, 1979
(from the portfolio, Flashpoints: Selected Images of Gilles Peress)
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Dr. Stephen G. Solomon, 98.9.1
Images by Jacqui Hopely Monkell