Three 20th-Century Figures

Akron Art Museum

This grouping features three historically and stylistically distinct studies of the human figure. The works by Frederick Carl Frieseke and Alex Katz, both depictions of their respective wives, evoke the Western art historical trope of the female muse who impels the artist toward innovation. Frieseke and his wife, Sarah Anne O’Bryan, were fixtures of the colony of American expatriate artists that congregated in Giverny, France, during the first two decades of the 20th century. Robert Colescott, on the other hand, deploys the nude as a stinging critique of American stereotypes in the context of the cultural and political crisis brought on by the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. Colescott cheekily references the 1971 hit “American Pie” by Don McLean. The song, which tells the story of a forlorn past, was released the same year the systematic American withdrawal from Vietnam began.