Staff Show 2018: Emma Sweeney

In this series, Manager of Visitor and Family Engagement Emily Bray highlights participants in This Is My Day Job: The 2018 James McLaughlin Memorial Staff Show, on view through September 30, 2018.

Crouch by Emma Sweeney

Crouch by Emma Sweeney

What do you do at The Phillips Collection? Are there any unique or interesting parts about your job that most people might not know about?

Museum Assistant. My favorite part of the job is getting one-on-one time with the artworks.

Photo of Emma Sweeney

Emma Sweeney

Who is your favorite artist in the collection?

Alexander Calder, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Joan Mitchell, Francisco de Goya

What is your favorite space within The Phillips Collection?

I love the Laib Wax Room and the former main gallery. It’s very secluded and peaceful there.

What would you like people to know about your artwork on view in the 2018 Staff Show (or your work in general)?

My piece for the staff show is a woodblock print which I made using two separately carved blocks. One block was carved using the jigsaw method, in which the block is cut up into different pieces that can then be inked separately and put back together like a jigsaw puzzle, allowing me to print multiple colors from one block. Apparently this was one of Edvard Munch’s favorite methods of printmaking (Munch is one of my personal printmaking heroes). The second block I carved serves as the “key” block, the central part of the final image (in this case the lines of the figure), which I printed on top of the jigsaw block. What I love best about this process is that it is a combination of printing and painting: I paint the inks onto the jigsaw block, which means I can be totally spontaneous with the color and gesture. Even though I am re-creating the same image each time, each print comes out looking radically different (no two are exactly alike). In terms of the image itself, I’ve always been drawn to the female form (for reasons I don’t quite understand), and I particularly like creating visceral, expressive poses.

This Is My Day Job: The James McLaughlin Memorial Staff Show is on view through September 30, 2018. 

When Pollock Embraced Spontaneity

All works: Jackson Pollock, Untitled, 1944/45 (printed 1967). Engraving and drypoint in blown-black on white Italia wove paper. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. (1) and (2) The William Stamps Farish Fund, 2009; (3) Gift of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc., 2009

In 1930, Jackson Pollock confessed to his brother his frustration that his drawing was “rotten; it seems to lack freedom and rhy[thm].” That changed dramatically in 1944, when Pollock spent several months at Atelier 17, the printmaking workshop where he practiced the Paul Klee-inspired automatic writing taught by Stanley William Hayter. Hayter’s Atelier 17 was a central meeting place for avantgarde artists such as Pollock, William Baziotes, Adolph Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko.

These three works were printed from more than 10 plates that Pollock etched over several months at Hayter’s studio. Hayter, who had seen how the method of automatic drawing had invigorated French surrealist artists, saw the potential to convert more followers among the American abstract artists. He insisted that his acolytes etch directly into the zinc plates without any preparatory sketches and call upon their unconscious to generate line drawings. Hayter’s studio became a rite of passage for many Abstract Expressionists, although it had an especially profound impact on Pollock, who took from the experience an appreciation for spontaneous, nondescriptive line. The emphasis on the physical act of making art set the stage for Pollock’s breakthrough just a few years later to his drip paintings.

This work is on view in Ten Americans: After Paul Klee through May 6, 2018.

At the Races

Each week for the duration of the exhibition, we’ll focus on works of art from Toulouse-Lautrec Illustrates the Belle Époque, on view Feb. 4 through April 30, 2017.

Jockey, The_Toulouse-Lautrec

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, The Jockey, 1899. Crayon, brush, and spatter lithograph, printed in six colors. Key stone printed in black, color stones in turquoise-green, red, brown, gray-beige and blue on China paper. State II/II, 20 3/8 × 14 1/4 in. Private collection

In 1899, Toulouse-Lautrec’s family committed him without consent to a clinic on the rue de Madrid, Neuilly. He expressed despair to his father: “I am locked up and anything that is locked up dies.” Excursions to the Bois de Boulogne, where the famous Longchamp Racecourse was located, provided him with some diversions. His final lithographs show animals, sporting events, and outdoor activities, subjects fondly remembered from his youth. The Jockey is from a series of four racing prints. This dynamic work, the only one published, places the viewer amid the action. The jockeys rise out of their saddles and encourage their horses down the track. The print shows Toulouse-Lautrec’s awareness of Eadweard Muybridge’s pioneering photographs of a horse at a gallop and Edgar Degas’s influential paintings and drawings of horses with their jockeys.