Summer Vacation Redux #6: Kansas City: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, part 1 of 9

The second day of my Total Eclipse cross-country road trip in Kansas City was a day of Art that began at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.  The city's traditional main museum of art opened in 1933 in a two story neoclassical structure made possible by combining two major bequests made by William Rockhill Nelson and Mary McAfee Atkins (they did not know one another in life).  In 2007 it received a major modern addition of the Bloch Building to feature works of Contemporary Art, African Art, Photography, and modern Sculpture.  Because there is so much to cover, I am breaking this visit up into smaller chunks of images and examples from the collections by topic.  We begin with the contemporary galleries in the Bloch Building.

You conveniently enter this building from the parking garage.  The first thing you encounter is a monumental weaving.  I, however, could find no attribution for it anywhere.  So we are left to simply say it's beautiful and move on.

 "Interior with a Book" 1959, Richard Diebenkorn (American) 1922-1993

 "Starboat (Tugboat and River)" 1966, Wayne Thiebold (American) 1920 -

 "Jawbreaker Machine" 1963, Wayne Thiebold (American) 1920 -

I LOVE Thiebold. He applies paint with the apparent viscosity of icing and it's all I can do to just not stick out my tongue and lick his canvas!

 "Central Savings" 1975, Richard Estes (American) 1932 -

My favorite photo-realist painter.  At one point I fashioned some of my watercolors after his work.

 "Saint Adrian" 2006, Kehinde Wiley (American) 1977 -

"My works quote historical sources and position young black men within the field of power." ~ Kehinde Wiley.

The hottest ticket in any town.  He not only derives motifs from Renaissance portraiture, he also has created a workshop around it--the modern equivalent to Medieval ones from cultures European, sub-asian Indian/Persian, and far East Asian Chinese/Japanese/Korean.  Kehinde embodies the Renaissance human of the 21st century, and after failing to see his blockbuster retrospective exhibition in Atlanta or Brooklyn, fate saw it clear to let me wallow in it in Seattle in March of 2016.  If there is a museum in North America that doesn't own at least one of his works...it's a pretty huge hole in their contemporary collection.

 "Spell" 2006, Maria Lassnig (Austrian) 1919 - 2014

I love her work, and I'm seeing it more and more in contemporary collections since her death.  She was born the same year as my mother--if only my mother had lived so long...

 "Research in a Growth Hormone" 1978, Alfred Jensen (American) 1903 - 1981

The way this work emulated a quilt resonated with me.

 "Mural" 1943, Jackson Pollock (American) 1912 - 1956

This one is part of a two painting focus exhibition called simply "Pollock and Motherwell".

"Chromoplastic Mural" 2011, Luis Tomasello (Argentinian) 1915 - 2014