Handwerker Gallery Newsletter
Spring 1999 – Volume 1, Number 1
His recent solo show of mixed media at the Handwerker Gallery, Studies in History (January 22– February 21), combined Estes’s love for the past with his interest in vision and in collective experience.
...It takes a lot of time, effort, and self-promotion — all those things I’ve always found secondary to making and teaching art. But Studies in History has been a really good experience, and maybe [it will give] me more energy to get out and show.
In her lecture "Art History as Melancholy" — traditionally, art historical writing reserves the figure of melancholy for the artist — Holly argued that art historical writing in its traumatic confrontation with the object of its inquiry is always bound to remain a melancholic enterprise.
...The kinds of questioning that have animated poststructuralist art history writing—such as who speaks for whom, what’s left out of the archive, how objects and subjects or past and present are part of an ongoing dialogue, the connections between high and low arts and attitudes—are all issues that are shared by those who study mass media and popular arts, even if they come from different traditions (e.g., British social science).
Paintings such as The Sower (1850–51, Philadelphia Museum of Art) led to the accusation that he was a socialist, and his work extolling the virtues of labor — for example, The Gleaners (1857, Louvre) and The Man with the Hoe (1859–62, Mrs.
...Because of his painting The Man with the Hoe, the Socialists thought Millet was on their side, assuming that this artist, who had undergone so much suffering, this peasant of genius who had expressed the sadness of peasant life, would necessarily have to be in agreement with their ideas.
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