Iowa’s museums enrich our communities and contribute to the state economy through job creation, industry attraction, and worker retention; the purchase of goods and services; and as leading visitor destinations, attract tourism revenue to their communities and the state.
That being said – Have we shown you the great stuff in the DuMA Gift Shop lately?! Check out the pics below and message us if you see something you just can’t live without!
The Dubuque Museum of Art joins in a statewide celebration of Iowa’s museums by participating in Iowa Museum Week this week of June 8-14. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Iowa Museum Week will be virtual, raising awareness of the many aspects of museum work over the course of the week.
Iowa’s museums provide educational resources and programs that support educators, expand learning opportunities for all ages, and provide active learning environments.
The Dubuque Museum of Art joins in a statewide celebration of Iowa’s museums by participating in Iowa Museum Week this week of June 8-14. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Iowa Museum Week will be virtual, raising awareness of the many aspects of museum work over the course of the week.
Looking for inspiration for your “Portraits of the Pandemic” exhibition submission? What about some inspiration from art history?
Featured Historic Self Portrait: Elizabeth Vigee-LeBrun
French artist Élisabeth Louise Vigée-LeBrun (French, 1755–1842) was best known as Marie Antoinette’s favorite painter for a decade. She also enjoyed the patronage of European aristocrats, actors, and writers and was elected to art academies in ten cities.
Trained by her portrait painter father, Vigée-LeBrun demonstrated a gift for the arts at an early age. By age 15 she was earning enough money to support her widowed mother and siblings. At 21 she married Jean-Baptiste-Pierre LeBrun, a painter and art dealer who helped her gain valuable access to the art world.
By the 1770s, she was taking clients. By 1783, she had claimed one of the four seats reserved for women at the Academy, due to direct intervention from Queen Marie Antoinette, her most famous subject, and King Louis XVI. Because of her high-profile relationship with Marie Antoinette she was forced to flee the country at the time of the French Revolution.
Image was vital to Vigée Le Brun’s promotion as an artist, and her self-portraits are a skillful combination of fine art and advertising. They depict a self-confident artist who is aware and worthy of the tradition of the Old Masters.
Feeling inspired? For information on how to submit your self-portrait, click the link below:
Emily Newton Barto (1896–1968) was an American children’s book illustrator, writer, craftsperson, writer, and designer.
In 1937, as part of the New Deals Federal Art Project Barto painted the mural, “Animal Tales” for the Fordham Hospital in New York City. A docile tabby cat served as Barto’s model as she brought to life the nursery rhyme There Was a Crooked Man:
‘There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;
He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.’
Vincent Price, THE star of campy horror films for six decades (House of Wax, The Tinglers, and Edward Scissorhands, etc) was also an art collector, food historian and a gourmet chef who authored several cookbooks, including A Treasury of Great Recipes and Cooking Price-Wise, which was based on his television show. In addition, Price released cooking tutorials on vinyl; and demonstrated his cooking skills on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where he poached fish in a dishwasher.
Price came to cooking naturally. His grandfather invented one of the first cream of tartar-based baking powders, and his father was the president of the National Candy Company. Remarked Price, “There are three things which really turn me on…one is work, another is art and the third is food.”
Here is his recipe for the unlikely pairing of bacon and mousse. For the daring palate:
Bacon Mousse
½ lb. leftover bacon, finely chopped
4 tablespoons horse-radish sauce
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
½ teaspoon dry mustard
1 tablespoon gelatin
¼ pint cold water
¼ pint cream
Dissolve gelatin in the cold water. Heat for 10 minutes, add to cream and mayonnaise. Beat well together and add remaining ingredients. Mix and turn into moistened mold. You can vary this to taste—unmold onto lettuce hearts and watercress.
Vincent Leonard Price Jr. (May 27, 1911 – October 25, 1993)
Looking for inspiration for your “Portraits of the Pandemic” exhibition submission? What about some inspiration from art history?
Featured Historic Self Portrait: Paula Modersohn-Becker
German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) was best known for her expressionistic self-portraits, scenes of children with their mothers, and brooding landscapes. Painted in luminous colors and crude brushstrokes, her works were inspired by Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh. Modersohn-Becker was one of the first German artists to work in a style that became known as Expressionism.
Modersohn-Becker made numerous self-portraits, in countless variations. She was likely the first modern woman artist to have painted nude self-portraits.
Despite selling only three paintings during her lifetime, her distinct style, perseverance in overcoming considerable barriers to women artists, and daring subject matter made her an artist few could ignore. Undaunted by the scant recognition she received, she felt she had made a leap forward with her large-scale nudes and self-portraits, writing that through this highly personal body of work, “I will make something of myself.”
One of her last paintings, Self-Portrait with Two Flowers in Her Raised Left Hand (1907), was painted while she was pregnant. Later that year, she died of complications just 20 days after giving birth to a daughter. She was 31 years old.
Misplaced by History: Artists Worth Knowing Jean Metzinger
French painter Jean Metzinger (1883-1956) may be one of the least known Cubist painters, but he was the first to write a major treatise on the topic, Du “Cubisme” in 1912. A prominent member of the French avant-garde, the cerebral Metzinger relentlessly examined systems and strategies in his art throughout his career.
Metzinger was born in Nantes, France in 1883. At the age of twenty he moved to Paris to pursue a career as a painter. Not long after he met a notorious group of Bohemian artists, poets and writers, among them Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Georges Braque, who sought to change the course of art history. The leader of the group, Pablo Picasso, was to have a profound influence on him.
An early interest in mathematics led Metzinger to Cubism. In 1910, he was the first to explain it by pointing out that Picasso and Braque had dismissed traditional perspective and merged multiple views of an object in a single image. They understood that as humans we view the world in a Cubist manner, from a variety of angles, simultaneously, our minds putting images together cohesively. Said Metzinger, “The visible world only becomes the real world by the operation of thought,”
In 1911 Metzinger participated in the controversial Salle 41 at the Salon des Indépendants, the first formal group exhibition of Cubist painters. His work was represented at the Salon d’Automne in Paris that same year.
Metzinger was a gifted and versatile critic, poet and writer that argued passionately against traditional approaches in art and the need for portraying multiple perspectives to better understand reality and time.
Serving in the army during World War I, Metzinger returned in 1919 to Paris, where he lived for the remainder of his life. His work went through several phases and he continued to exhibit throughout his life.
Metzinger died in 1956 in Paris. Today, his works are included in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, among others.
