User:MauraWen/sandbox Hobson Pittman

Hobson Pittman

"Raised in Tarboro, North Carolina, Pittman studied at Penn State and other institutions, ultimately settling in the Philadelphia area, where he taught at various local schools. He was featured in Life magazine in 1945 and eagelery collected by upper crust lovers of romantic, antimodern art. Despite living in the North over the entire span of his career, Pittman worshipped at the shrine of the old moonlight-and-magnolia South. The abiding sentiment of his work, indeed, was nostalgia for the lost Victorian world of his childhood, compounded by his lifelong search and need, for a mother, his own mother's death when he was still in his teens having been a traumatic blow from which he never recovered."

"Pitmman's interiors have a dreamlike unreality, where spectral inhabitants exist in a moody atmosphere of thick shadow or ghostly moonlight, as in Miss Pat and Miss Eva Lyon, actual personages from Pittman's youth."

Many critics have associated Pittman with the eerie tales of Edgar Allan Poe and, more generally, the Southern Gothic... Pittman's nostalgia wa all about personal loss, too, as we see in The Widow, which embodies that strain of melancholy memory in his art."

He had a long term relationship with Margaret Sanger, pioneering birth-control campaigner and founder of Planned Parenthood. Stranger was considerably older. They met in 1945 and fell in love. Their relationship may never have been consummated."

Style
"in his paintings and pastels he encoded those melancholy emotions in Victorian furniture. In Pittman's interiors, a Belter sofa or a Rocococo Revial chair was no mere antique but the symbolic surrogate for the absent perso-or often for himself. He was known as the poet-painter of the empty chair."

"Pittman in his prime had an eager market for his work; he produced several paintings a year for the Milch galleries in New York and the Biltmore Gallery in Los Angeles. Collectors snapped them up. Even Edward Hopper admired him. He created his signature illustrations for the magazines Holiday and Life and over the decades taught legions of students at the Pennsylvania Acadamey of Fine Arts, among them Gothic filmmaker David Lynch."

"In later life, he gave his old themes an angular modernist edge and lightened his palette to a range of delicate pastel tints that dispelled the ghostly gloom of his earlier signature style. Pitmman's 'range was narrow, but at his best he encapsulated the dreams and memories of an idealized and whitewashed South that existed nowhere outside his own imagination."

"Hobson Pittman studied at the Rouse Art School, Tarboro, North Carolina; Pennsylvania State College; The Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburg; and Columbia University, New York. He won an honorable mention at the San Francisco World's Fair (YEAR?); two awards at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Clark Prize, the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC; and a prize, Carnegie Insitute (Pittsburgh, PA) American Exhibition. His paintings are found in public collections such as athe Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; the Brooklyn Museum,; the Phillips Memorial Gallery, Washington, DC; and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond. For many years he was an instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy."

Artists

 * Elizabeth Nourse
 * Christina Ramberg
 * Hughie Lee Smith
 * Paul F. Keene Jr.
 * Edith Hamlin