"We are living in a material world, and I am a material girl," Madonna sang in the refrain of her 1985 hit single, "Material Girl." With this catchy tune, the Queen of Pop placed the so-called "modern woman" at the forefront of American consumer culture. In doing so, the musical icon tapped into a rich legacy of artistic explorations of the American female and her role in the sphere of shopping and small talk. Another part of this legacy is on display in "Figure Study: The Fourteenth Street School and the Woman in Public," one of the fall exhibitions at the University Art Museum, which casts its gaze on a group of six artists who crafted scores of images of material girls who walked the streets of New York City 50 years before Madonna released her first album.
Working with a wide array of media, ranging from graphite and pen to oil paint and tempera, these members of the Fourteenth Street School sought to track the rise of the modern woman in the world of New York's Union Square neighborhood. The resulting studies, etchings and paintings amount to an immersive exhibition which provides both scintillating social commentary and fabulous insights into the artistic process.
Pulling primarily from the University's own collections, guest curator Melissa Ragain has constructed an exhibit which strikes a perfect balance between variety and unity. The featured oil paintings nicely complement the smaller studies and etchings on display, and each of the six featured artists find suitable representation on the exhibition's walls. Still, in adorning every section of each room with works by Kenneth Hayes Miller, the most influential teacher of the school, Ragain succeeds in examining the ways in which his students either embraced or transformed some of their instructor's methods.
"You can see how Isabel Bishop begins to work the smooth finished surfaces of Miller's canvases into the flickering, evanescent surfaces of her later paintings," Ragain explained in an email. "Or then you might notice the difference in the way that Reginald Marsh uses tempera - in thin, sketchy washes - compared to the way that Miller uses it to produce areas of dense, matte color."
Each artist emerges with a distinctive style. Miller's fascination with capturing the human face in a purely realistic manner, made evident in etchings like "Man's Head," contrasts sharply with Guy P
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