Sketchbooks Reveal Artists' Process and Inspiration

Oct. 5, 2007 -- A selection of sketchbooks from artists Walter Shirlaw, Isabel Bishop, Leon Kroll, Frank Stella, Lowell Nesbitt and others is presented in the new exhibition "Sketchbooks from the Archives of American Art" Oct. 5 to Jan. 6, 2008, in the Archives of American Art's Lawrence A. Fleischman Gallery.

Sketchbooks are as varied as the artists who keep them. Painter Reginald Marsh cut and bound scrap paper to fit the size of his coat pocket; modernist Charles Green Shaw tested abstract shapes in large spiral-bound books; and Louis Bunn kept notes in composition books for his WPA Federal Art Project post office mural in Minden, N.E.

Featured in the exhibition is the sketchbook that Worthington Whittredge used while traveling down the Rhine in 1849 to begin his formal training at the Royal Academy in Dusseldorf; Lockwood de Forest's minimalist landscape studies of Egypt, dating from 1876; and Oscar Bluemner's "painting diaries" documenting his all-consuming commitment to aesthetic exploration. "One rule," wrote Bluemner, "draw and paint, equally, constantly, separately, thinking, feeling."

About the Archives of American Art
The Archives of American Art is dedicated to the collection, preservation and study of papers and other primary records of the history of the visual arts in America. Its collections, comprising 16 million items, are the world's largest single source for such information. Visit the Archives Web site at www.aaa.si.edu.

The Lawrence A. Fleischman Gallery is located on the first floor of the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art, located at Eighth and F streets N.W., Washington, D.C. Hours are 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily. Admission is free.

Source: Smithsonian Institution

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