12 Turkey Pics

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! I thought I’d collect some turkeys for you. Most, at the moment of rendering, are inedible, but likely so is yours at this point. Be thankful you do not have to pluck, and enjoy the day.

Look at this crazy painting by Alice Neel. There’s a squig of a dinner, hard outlines, deep unsettling diagonals, and a bottle of ajax. And yet, the painting is still friendly to my eyes. I adore this silly painting like I adore an odd but sincere friend. I’m teaching a little workshop on Alice Neel next quarter, so I’ll be posting more from her.

From https://www.artic.edu/artworks/21727/thanksgiving :

“Doris Lee’s bustling scene of women preparing a Thanksgiving feast became the object of national headlines when it was first exhibited at the Art Institute in 1935 and won the prestigious Logan Purchase Prize. The themes of Thanksgiving, rural customs, and family life, which Lee painted in a deliberately folksy manner, would have had great appeal to a country still in the midst of the Depression. Yet Josephine Logan, the donor of the prize, condemned the work’s broad, exaggerated style, founding the conservative “Sanity in Art” movement in response. This controversy only brought Lee fame, and Thanksgiving has been recognized as one of the most popular nostalgic views of this American ritual since that time.”

Good Ol’ Grandma Moses. She started painting at 78 and charmed us all.

The New York Times: “The simple realism, nostalgic atmosphere and luminous color with which Grandma Moses portrayed simple farm life and rural countryside won her a wide following. She was able to capture the excitement of winter’s first snow, Thanksgiving preparations and the new, young green of oncoming spring… In person, Grandma Moses charmed wherever she went. A tiny, lively woman with mischievous gray eyes and a quick wit, she could be sharp-tongued with a sycophant and stern with an errant grandchild.”

Soutine was a bridge from traditional painting into abstract expressionism. Relevant turkey.

 

From How Stuff Works:

“Claude Monet painted Turkeys in 1876. Monet painted a flock of turkeys on the lawn of his patron Hoschede’s estate in Montgeron. Planned as a decorative panel, Turkeys marked the rare introduction of animals into Monet’s natural setting.”

“When the work was shown in the third Impressionist exhibition, the critical response was mixed. One critic urged the viewer to think of how well it would look in a lavishly furnished dining room, while others disparaged Monet’s choice of subject as ridiculous.”

Now that’s a woman.

 

Oh Goya, always so good at freaking me out, beautifully.

 

From the Tate:

“Currin has claimed that Thanksgiving, completed in New York where he has lived and worked since the late 1980s, was ‘a failed painting that sat around in my studio’ until he decided to return to it when his wife, the artist Rachel Feinstein, became pregnant. Currin explained,

The funny thing is that the painting took me exactly nine months to finish, and the painting turned into an allegory of Rachel’s pregnancy. Certain kinds of paintings were on my mind at the time – Dutch genre paintings, Velázquez’s bodegones – but as soon as I began, it became more about Rachel, and she posed for the figures a lot. – Currin, quoted in Weg and Dergan 2006, p.326.”

I hope your Thanksgiving is at least three measures more cheerful than this one.

While his wife and kids scrambled to make Thanksgiving at home, Gaugin observed the harvest festival in Maruru. This is said to be a painting of gratitude. I bet.

I really have no idea how this is a Turkey (in 2 parts) but I enjoy it. Richard Tuttle’s minimalist of minimal drawings always give me a little giggle at the humor, and delight me with the (very) subtle textures and carefully considered open spaces.

Not my favorite, but certainly deserves a place amongst the turkeys. Direct, inedible, unfestive, reproducible art. This turkey was likely inspired by a newspaper advertisement. Lichtenstein designed the image, then handed it off to silkscreen printers who transferred it to mass-produced shopping bags.

From Moma:

“Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and other Pop artists created multiples for the 1964 exhibition American Supermarket, which highlighted the differences and similarities between the actual consumer objects and Pop artists’ depictions of them. The exhibition was designed to resemble a supermarket, complete with aisles, shelves, and a checkout counter. Plastic and real food items were displayed alongside artists’ depictions of them. Artworks were priced and sold cheaply, further blurring the line between art, commerce, and consumption. These bags were sold for 12 dollars each.”

 

Artwork by Morris Graves always seems so sensitively rendered, so quiet, it slows me down. Maybe it’s because I’m also a child of the Pacific Northwest , and also with ties to Japan, but artwork by Graves always feels as familiar as my own whisper.

From Wiki:

“[Graves]…used the muted tones of the Northwest environment, Asian aesthetics and philosophy, and a personal iconography of birds, flowers, chalices, and other images to explore the nature of consciousness.”