Koehnline Museum of Art: Current Exhibition

 

Retrospective: Joseph Meert  

July 2 – August 27, 2009

 

Born in Brussels, Belgium , Joseph Meert (1905 – 1989) emigrated to the U.S. at the age of five. As a young adult he studied with Thomas Hart Benton at the Kansas City Art Institute, where Meert himself taught from 1935 to 1941. During the Great Depression, he worked as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) artist, painting murals in government buildings. He became a close friend to Jackson Pollock, and is credited with saving Pollock’s life on a sub-zero winter’s night in 1943. The works in this retrospective examine Meert’s influences, from social realism during the Depression, through geometric abstraction in the late 1940s, to abstract expressionism in the 1950s and beyond. Meert spent his last decade institutionalized for mental illness, his care funded in part a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. With the aid of an art therapist, however, he continued to produce a final series of watercolors during this period.



 

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Woodcutters, c. 1930, Egg tempera on panel, 5 ½ x 6 ¼ in., Courtesy of Aaron Galleries, Chicago.

Stringed Instrument, 1948, Oil on canvas, 40 x 32 in., Gift of Joel Dryer
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Untitled, c. early 1950s, Watercolor on paper, 8 x 13 ¾ in., Courtesy of Aaron Galleries, Chicago.
Yellow Ballet, 1956, Oil on canvas, 43 x 57 in., Gift of Joel Dryer.


 

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