Let your eye wander this image for a minute. What draws your attention first? How does the artist gu

Let your eye wander this image for a minute. What draws your attention first? How does the artist guide your eye across the page?Standing in the center of this gouache painting is a long thin figure. She wears a cream colored overdress or smock, the white hem of a dress underneath poking out at the bottom. Her feet in their cream colored shoes are pointed delicately in different directions in an almost balletic pose. She wears a wide-brimmed black hat, and tilts her head to our right as she looks straight out at us from kohl-lined eyes. In her left hand is a paint palette and several paintbrushes, and in her right hand is a single paintbrush. Though my eyes are drawn to this figure first, the swirling floral motifs in the background quickly redirect my gaze. On a blue-green background are large flowering plants; they are much larger than the central figure, and arch over and around her in a sweeping formation that moves our eyes clockwise around the composition. A rich red curtain borders the top and sides, giving the effect of a stage curtain being opened onto the scene. All the colors in this scene are also present on the painter’s palette, as though she has painted herself into this world. As my eyes return to this figure, I notice that beneath her feet is a rich red, circular rug with a blue flower on it. Written in an elegant script on top of this rug is the name “Florine.”This painting is a portrait of the artist Florine Stettheimer, a prominent figure in the New York salon scene during the 1910s and 1920s. This portrait was painted by Adolfo Best Maugard while he was in New York in 1920, one year after Stettheimer painted Heat (also in the collection). Adolfo Best Maugard was a Mexican artist and art historian who developed an art education program for Mexican primary schools, in which Best Maugard blended European abstract art with both ancient and contemporary Mexican indigenous art as a way of developing a uniquely Mexican aesthetic. In his book A Method for Creative Design, Best Maugard outlined seven principle elements for depicting nature. These elements were the spiral, the circle, the half-circle, the S-motif, the curved line, and the straight line. In thinking about how objects in motion might appear when frozen in a created image, Best Maugard writes: “Motion-Form is represented in types of the Arch of motion, the whirling spiral.” With this in mind, look again at the painting. Where do you see aspects of this “motion-form?”Best Maugard and Stettheimer were close friends, and some have speculated that aspects of Best Maugard’s artistic practice can be seen in Stettheimer’s own work. Compare Best Maugard’s portrait of Stettheimer with Stettheimer’s portrait of herself and her family in Heat. What aspects of both compositions are similar? What distinguishes each as unique? Share your thoughts on the relationship between Best Maugard’s and Stettheimer’s works in the replies.Posted by Christina MarinelliAdolfo Best Maugard (Mexican, 1891-1965). Florine, 1920. Gouache on paper. Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of Richard J. Kempe, 2003.27.2 (Photo: Brooklyn Museum) -- source link

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