Template:Did you know nominations/The Silver Veil and the Golden Gate
- The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.
The result was: promoted by AirshipJungleman29 talk 15:15, 26 November 2024 (UTC)
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The Silver Veil and the Golden Gate
- ... that an Indiana university argued in court that The Silver Veil and the Golden Gate, a 1914 painting, was too modern for their art collection in 2024?
- Source: Aguiar, Annie (July 19, 2024). "To Sell Prized Paintings, a University Proclaims They're Not 'Conservative'". The New York Times. Retrieved November 7, 2024.
- Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Sonya Friedman; Template:Did you know nominations/Nikolaus Mollyn
Viriditas (talk) 04:00, 8 November 2024 (UTC).
Interesting painting, covered well and detailed on fine sources, subscription sources accepted AGF. I am less happy with the hook. My understanding - which of course may be wrong - is not that they found it too modern, but that they thought those who had bought it earlier should have found it too modern, which is a completely different thing. I would prefer to get a bit more info in the hook about the subject than "a 1914 painting" - painter, style, subject, whatever. The title alone didn't prepare me for the beautiful thing I saw, and the hook would not have made me look, - it was your name that hooked me ;) - If you still want that hook, I'll approve it, of course. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 23:06, 12 November 2024 (UTC)
- @Gerda Arendt: This controversy is covered by the NYT,[1] so I won't go into it too much here other than to say that this subject, American Impressionist Childe Hassam (1859–1935), was called "conservative to the core" by New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl in 2004, and that is the accepted opinion by art historians. To address this slightly further, Hassam embraced an older, antiquated kind of modernism dating to about the 1870s, which represented the art of the generation before him. Ironically by the time the American art world accepted Hassam as status quo, perhaps by the time of the Armory Show of 1913 or thereabouts, the time of the American Impressionists had come and gone. Hassam was on record expressing his extreme displeasure at the ascendancy of the new Cubism, so his conservativsm as an artist was well known. I won't go into Hassam's social conservatism, as there is quite a bit written on that subject, similar to that of Renoir, and it's somewhat separate from his conservative approach to art. The quirky nature of the hook is centered around a 110-year-old painting by an artist who vocally objected to the trajectory of modern art in 1913 and yet was considered "too modern" by Valparaiso University in 2024 based on a specious legal argument that hinges on the definition and interpretation of "conservative" art, a definition that is disputed by art historians and legal experts. I should like to add one final thing: while writing a series of articles about this topic, I found that the legal argument made by Valparaiso University doesn't hold up based on the history of art. It turns out that the techniques and philosophy found in the Hudson River School, attributed to its founder Thomas Cole, which forms the underlying basis of Valparaiso's argument that Hassam's work is too modern to be included in the university collection, are in fact, almost identical to the working technique and philosophy of Childe Hassam. I laughed out loud when I realized this (and I think I woke up my neighbors at 2 AM) because it means Valparaiso's case should never have been approved by the courts. It turns out that Hassam used the same technique that Cole talks about in the 1840s and 1850s. This involves "creating compositions of both representational and imaginative landscapes, where the artist creates a fusion of what is both in the natural world and in the mind on the canvas". Hassam famously did this throughout his career, most notably in the painting Point Lobos, Carmel (1914) to such an extent, that the artist he was working with, Francis McComas (1874-1938), had a fit and complained to his wife about Hassam's conservative, anti-modernist approach, and the incident made its way into the history books. To summarize: I think it's possible you missed the point I was making. With that said, I am open to creating new hooks as always. Viriditas (talk) 00:40, 13 November 2024 (UTC)
--Gerda Arendt (talk) 05:56, 13 November 2024 (UTC)
- Hi, to respond to the comment in your edit history, no, it's not supposed to be inside baseball, and if it comes off that way, it definitely needs a new hook. I will present others to choose from, but it doesn't look like you'll be around. I can make a request on DYK to have others look. Viriditas (talk) 08:54, 13 November 2024 (UTC)
- @Gerda Arendt: This controversy is covered by the NYT,[1] so I won't go into it too much here other than to say that this subject, American Impressionist Childe Hassam (1859–1935), was called "conservative to the core" by New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl in 2004, and that is the accepted opinion by art historians. To address this slightly further, Hassam embraced an older, antiquated kind of modernism dating to about the 1870s, which represented the art of the generation before him. Ironically by the time the American art world accepted Hassam as status quo, perhaps by the time of the Armory Show of 1913 or thereabouts, the time of the American Impressionists had come and gone. Hassam was on record expressing his extreme displeasure at the ascendancy of the new Cubism, so his conservativsm as an artist was well known. I won't go into Hassam's social conservatism, as there is quite a bit written on that subject, similar to that of Renoir, and it's somewhat separate from his conservative approach to art. The quirky nature of the hook is centered around a 110-year-old painting by an artist who vocally objected to the trajectory of modern art in 1913 and yet was considered "too modern" by Valparaiso University in 2024 based on a specious legal argument that hinges on the definition and interpretation of "conservative" art, a definition that is disputed by art historians and legal experts. I should like to add one final thing: while writing a series of articles about this topic, I found that the legal argument made by Valparaiso University doesn't hold up based on the history of art. It turns out that the techniques and philosophy found in the Hudson River School, attributed to its founder Thomas Cole, which forms the underlying basis of Valparaiso's argument that Hassam's work is too modern to be included in the university collection, are in fact, almost identical to the working technique and philosophy of Childe Hassam. I laughed out loud when I realized this (and I think I woke up my neighbors at 2 AM) because it means Valparaiso's case should never have been approved by the courts. It turns out that Hassam used the same technique that Cole talks about in the 1840s and 1850s. This involves "creating compositions of both representational and imaginative landscapes, where the artist creates a fusion of what is both in the natural world and in the mind on the canvas". Hassam famously did this throughout his career, most notably in the painting Point Lobos, Carmel (1914) to such an extent, that the artist he was working with, Francis McComas (1874-1938), had a fit and complained to his wife about Hassam's conservative, anti-modernist approach, and the incident made its way into the history books. To summarize: I think it's possible you missed the point I was making. With that said, I am open to creating new hooks as always. Viriditas (talk) 00:40, 13 November 2024 (UTC)
