When we think things out, it is usually on paper. Writers scribble random thoughts on scraps near at hand and mine those jotted flashes of insight later for fuller, more realized essays. Artists, however, use paper both for unfinished and finished works—preliminary drawings or paintings pointing forward as well as completely realized art that stands at the end of the process. American Moderns on Paper: Masterworks from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, currently at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, brings together an amazing collection of American art on that most fragile of supports, paper. These works and artists find themselves together thanks mainly to chronology, which leads to strange and strangely fascinating bedfellows. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Paper Tiger."
[Image: Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009). Granddaughter, 1956. Dry brush and opaque watercolor on thick wove paper. © Andrew Wyeth. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; Gift of Mrs. Robert Montgomery, 1991.79. wadsworth9.]
[Many thanks to the Amon Carter Museum for providing me with the image above and catalogue from American Moderns on Paper: Masterworks from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, which runs through May 30, 2010.]
