Room with Vases and Flowers
Maker
Philip Hanson
(American, b. 1943)
Date1974 - 1975
MediumEtching with handcoloring in watercolor on stiff wove paper
DimensionsPlate: 9 3/4 x 7 13/16 in. (24.8 x 19.8 cm)
Credit LineGift of the artist
Object number1992.69
Object TypePrints
On View
Not on viewPrimarily known as a painter in his maturity, Phil Hanson studied architecture briefly before attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1960s, where he met other emerging Chicago Imagist artists. He participated in the False Image exhibitions in 1968 and 1969 with Roger Brown, Christina Ramberg, and Eleanor Dube, which were organized in the spirit of the Hairy Who exhibitions (1966‒1969), similarly at the Hyde Part Art Center in the South Side neighborhood of Hyde Park in Chicago.
Hanson created intaglio prints (etchings, mezzotints and aquatints) in the 1960s and 1970s in which he focused on problems of pictorial space drawn from conceptions of space that predate the establishment of perspectival laws in the Renaissance, as well as their exaggeration for theatrical purposes in, for example, Baroque stagecraft. His prints depict marginal architectural spaces emptied of human presence, probably stimulated by book illustration, from the decorative marginalia of medieval manuscripts, to architectural treatises, to decorative vignettes on frontispieces. The motifs commonly found in his mature work (shell, leaf, and flower) emerged first in his prints. Likewise, his intaglio work relates to paintings on similar themes. (See Smart Museum 2007.19.)
Hanson created intaglio prints (etchings, mezzotints and aquatints) in the 1960s and 1970s in which he focused on problems of pictorial space drawn from conceptions of space that predate the establishment of perspectival laws in the Renaissance, as well as their exaggeration for theatrical purposes in, for example, Baroque stagecraft. His prints depict marginal architectural spaces emptied of human presence, probably stimulated by book illustration, from the decorative marginalia of medieval manuscripts, to architectural treatises, to decorative vignettes on frontispieces. The motifs commonly found in his mature work (shell, leaf, and flower) emerged first in his prints. Likewise, his intaglio work relates to paintings on similar themes. (See Smart Museum 2007.19.)
