Norman Rockwell’s Christmas: Original Art for Hallmark Cards

Category Archive: Uncategorized

Norman Rockwell’s Christmas: Original Art for Hallmark Cards
January 11, 2018 2:40 pm Leave a Comment

Among the many prominent artists who have created work for Hallmark Cards, none is more beloved than Norman Rockwell. The most prolific and influential illustrator of the last century, Rockwell produced nearly 4,000 pictures for more than 150 companies, including magazine covers for The Saturday Evening Post and annual calendars for the Boy Scouts of America. Among his most enduring images are Rockwell’s Christmas paintings for Hallmark, which helped define the spirit and traditions of the holiday season for millions of Americans.

Hallmark founder J.C. Hall commissioned Rockwell to paint 32 Christmas designs, beginning with images for the 1948 Hallmark Gallery Artists Collection, an exclusive card line that included modern masters such as Salvador Dali, Georgia O’Keeffe and Grandma Moses. Over the ensuing decade, Rockwell interpreted the yuletide theme in a variety of guises, ranging from the characters of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol to the exploits of the modern American family. Reproduced in many contexts over the years, these heartwarming and humorous images have come to epitomize Rockwell’s masterful brand of narrative art.

Norman Rockwell’s Christmas is the most comprehensive exhibition ever assembled of Rockwell’s original art for Hallmark Cards. All works are from the Hallmark Art Collection with historic photographs and ephemera courtesy of the Hallmark Archives in Kansas City, Missouri and Norman Rockwell Museum Collection, Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

The exhibit is on display October 4, 2017 through January 27, 2018 at the Hallmark Art Collection Gallery in Hallmark Visitor’s Center, located in Kansas City’s Crown Center district. Admission is free.
SOL LEWITT: elemental
2:38 pm Leave a Comment

Using the essential design elements of line, shape and color, American artist Sol Lewitt (1928-2007) created a dazzling array of inventive and exuberant abstractions in a wide variety of media, including printmaking, painting and sculpture.

Much as a composer can conjure music from a limited scale, Lewitt created highly complex visual compositions from simple linear patterns, standard geometric forms, and a palette of only primary and secondary hues. The resulting works, often executed in extensive series with myriad variations, reveal the unusual breadth of his creative ingenuity and originality.

With a career beginning in the 1960s, Lewitt was a key player in the modern art movements of Minimalism, which reduced art to its most essential forms, and Conceptualism, which exalted the philosophical premise behind the artist’s work. While he often created small scale drawings and prints by hand, Lewitt preferred to have other artists render his larger paintings and sculptures according to his designs. His primary concern was for the pure logic of an abstract composition, rather than the artist’s personal handiwork. He believed that “The idea is the engine that creates the art.”

Lewitt’s architecturally scaled works, which he called Wall Drawings, were nearly always executed without his direct participation. A prime example is Wall Drawing #1118, Whirls and Twirls installed nearby in the lobby of 2555 Grand Boulevard. Hallmark commissioned Lewitt to create this vivid and dynamic mural in 2004, which was painted by local artists under the direction of Lewitt’s studio.

Sol Lewitt: elemental presents a small cross section of the more than one hundred works by Sol Lewitt in the Hallmark Art Collection. Seen together here for the first time, they reveal the many recurring themes he explored throughout his career and offer a glimpse into the artist’s enduring creative legacy.
The Art of the Poster: from Toulouse-Lautrec to Shepard Fairey
March 24, 2017 5:21 pm Leave a Comment
(more…)
“O, Canada!” at Hallmark Art Collection Gallery
December 7, 2016 5:16 pm Leave a Comment
In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the founding of William E. Coutts Co. Ltd, from which sprang today’s Hallmark Canada, Hallmark Art Collection presents a special exhibit of works by prominent Canadian artists.

Many of these paintings and prints were collected over the years by William E. Coutts, who, in 1916, founded the Toronto-based greeting card company that would become Coutts Hallmark, and, eventually, Hallmark Canada. Over the span of decades, Coutts generously supported Canadian artists with scholarships and awards, as well as commissions for numerous card designs. His company’s popular “Painters of Canada” Christmas card series have been in production periodically ever since the early 1930s.

This selection of works, which are now part of the Hallmark Art Collection, provides a vivid cross-section of Canadian landscape painting at its finest. Among the artists included are Alex Colville, Nicholas Hornyansky, Alexander Young (A.Y.) Jackson and James Edward Hervey (J.E.H.) MacDonald. This is the first time many of these works have been exhibited in the United States. The art is supplemented by vintage photos and historical ephemera from Hallmark Archives.

O, Canada! is on display now in the Hallmark Art Collection Gallery at Hallmark Visitors Center in Kansas City, Missouri through February, 2017.
“Word: the Art of Language” Now on View
August 1, 2016 5:45 pm Leave a Comment
This exhibition features contemporary art devoted to word play. The paintings, sculptures and prints on display represent a cross-section of artists working today at the fertile intersection of art and language. Focusing our attention on words— often words alone—they convey a broad array of messages, from the poignant to the absurd.

Among the artists included are Robert Cottingham, Leslie Dill, Nancy Dwyer, Jasper Johns, Bruce Nauman, Tim Rollins & K.O.S., James Rosenquist and Ed Ruscha, each of whom have long used text as a dominant element within their work. This exhibition is drawn entirely from the Hallmark Art Collection, which includes a wealth of text-based art, reflecting Hallmark’s long tradition of creative writing and an ongoing commitment to the fine arts of lettering and typographic design.

Word: the Art of Language is on view through November, 2016 at the Hallmark Art Collection Gallery located in the Hallmark Visitor’s Center in Kansas City. The exhibition is free and open to the public. More information about the Visitors Center can be found on their website.
Featured Acquisition: David Wojnarowicz
December 2, 2015 10:52 am Leave a Comment
Hallmark Art Collection is pleased to announce the acquisition of a major work by artist, writer and activist David Wojnarowicz. Biography of Peter Hujar (7 Miles a Second) is a moving tribute to Wojnarowicz’s close friend and mentor, painted shortly after Hujar passed away due to complications from AIDS. The work is especially notable for the inclusion of the mathematical formula for “escape velocity” (7 miles/second), the speed at which a mass must travel to break free of the earth’s gravity. With this poignant detail, Wojnarowicz transforms a very personal experience into an enduring meditation on death and transcendence.

This painting debuted in Wojnarowicz’s 1989 landmark exhibition In the Shadow of Forward Motion at P.P.O.W. Gallery in New York. In his closing notes of the catalogue written and designed by the artist for the exhibition, the philosopher Felix Guattari wrote: “David Wojnarowicz’s intention is strictly ideological: his aim is to effect the world at large; he attempts to create imaginary weapons to resist established powers.”

Biography of Peter Hujar (7 Miles a Second) was recently acquired by Hallmark directly from the artist’s estate and is the first work by the artist to enter the Hallmark Art Collection. It will be included in the forthcoming monograph to be published by the Whitney Museum of American Art.
“Op Art in America” on View Now
November 20, 2015 4:44 pm Leave a Comment
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, artists around the world became fascinated with the subject of visual perception. Their interest was spurred by recent advances in perceptual psychology and the science of optics, which together proved that vision was a product of both the eye and the mind. To test the boundaries of perception, they made paintings with pulsating patterns and dynamic color contrasts that stimulated profound optical effects.

The term Op Art, an abbreviation of “optical art,” was coined by the popular press to define the new abstraction, a stark contrast to the informal approach of the preceding generation of Abstract Expressionists. And in 1965 the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted a traveling exhibition of this growing international tendency titled The Responsive Eye. The show and resulting publicity influenced modern art and popular culture worldwide. Op motifs were readily adapted to graphic design, fashion, and home furnishings, defining the style of an era.

The artists on view here, including Richard Anuszkiewicz, Bill Komodore and Tadasky stand as leading figures in the American Op movement. While their art will be forever associated with the sixties, their lasting achievement was to offer the viewer an unprecedented role in the art equation, making our own perceptual experience the central subject of their work. This radical perspective continues to influence the work of young artists today who seek new ways to generate a similarly dynamic viewing experience.
Eastman Johnson’s “The Freedom Ring” on View at Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
June 23, 2015 7:25 pm Leave a Comment
A masterwork by 19^th century American genre painter Eastman Johnson is now on loan to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. Painted in 1860, The Freedom Ring is a powerful and enduring document of the abolitionist movement. It will hang for the remainder of the year alongside Johnson’s famed 1859 work Negro Life at the South, which is on extended loan from The New York Historical Society. These two works exemplify Eastman Johnson’s characteristically humanist portrayals of African Americans at a pivotal moment in American history.

The Freedom Ring was commissioned by Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, brother of abolitionist author Harriet Beecher Stowe, to tell the story of a girl nicknamed Little Pinky, who was bought out of slavery by Beecher’s congregation at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, New York. This moving story was widely reported, becoming an iconic victory for the abolitionist movement. The Freedom Ring was acquired by Hallmark in 1951 and is one of two Eastman Johnson paintings in the collection.

This special installation at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art commemorates the 150^th anniversary of the end of the Civil War and the official emancipation of U.S. slaves. For more information, visit the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art website.
Joe Houston Elected President of APAA
May 30, 2015 8:37 pm Leave a Comment
Hallmark Art Collection Curator Joe Houston was elected President of the Association of Professional Art Advisors (APAA). Headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, the APAA is the standard setting organization for the industry that includes prominent private art advisors and in-house corporate curators from around the world. Hallmark Art Collection has been a long-time institutional member of the APAA. Citigroup, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer Inc. and Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. are among the other major U.S. based corporations active in the organization.

Houston, who has been a member of the Board of Directors since May, 2014, was elected to a two-year term as President at the organization’s annual meeting in New York City on May 12. More information about APAA can be found at www.artadvisors.org.

Joe Houston will speak about APAA and the ethics of art advising at Art Southampton on July 10, 2015. For more details, see: http://www.oneartnation.com/on-demand-courses/your-own-private-art-advisor/.
Opening of Hallmark Art Collection Gallery
February 5, 2015 8:31 pm Comments Off on Opening of Hallmark Art Collection Gallery
Hallmark Visitors Center has just opened a newly designed gallery space dedicated to rotating exhibits from the Hallmark Art Collection. The inaugural exhibition Indelible: African American prints from the Hallmark Art Collection is now on display through the end of August. Exhibitions of approximately 6 months in duration will be on public view free of charge at the Visitors Center located in the Crown Center complex. A video showing the behind the scenes operations of the Hallmark Art Collection and its staff will be on continuous view in the gallery. With this space, the collection can further the reach of our art, fulfilling Hallmark founder J.C. Hall’s initial goals for the collection to “broaden the public appreciation of fine art.”

Indelible will be followed by Op Art in America, an exhibit featuring important paintings from the 1950s and 1960s by renowned perceptual artists of the era. Most of the artists represented, such as Richard Anuszkiewicz, Bill Komodore, and Tadasky were included in the Museum of Modern Art’s seminal 1965 exhibition The Responsive Eye. This historic show gave shape to a burgeoning international movement that critics at the time dubbed Op Art, short for “optical art” and a snappy twist on the reigning movement of Pop Art. Op quickly eclipsed Pop in public consciousness in the mid 1960s. The movement’s popularity in America was compounded by the easy adaption of Op motifs to advertising, design, and fashion.

Among the commercial application were the myriad Op puzzle designs created by Springbok, a company acquired by Hallmark. Original art and puzzles from the Springbok collection will offer a glimpse into the popularity of Op in the 1960s. In addition to paintings by the foremost American artists, original prints by Josef Albers, often called the Father of Op, will also be included. Op Art in America opens in September, 2015, coinciding with the 50^th anniversary of the Op Art movement.

Hallmark Visitors Center is open Monday through Saturday from 10:00am to 5:00pm. See their website for more details visit http://www.hallmarkvisitorscenter.com
Indelible: African American prints from the Hallmark Art Collection
7:57 pm Leave a Comment
This exhibition offers a cross-section of the diverse perspectives to be found in the work of contemporary African American artists. Addressing a wide array of issues in a variety of pictorial styles, these artists share a common concern for history, often tapping into our collective unconscious to powerful effect. The medium of printmaking is also a connecting thread due in great part to the efforts of master printer Robert Blackburn. He revitalized the medium for postwar artists and helped many here create works at his celebrated Printmaking Workshop in New York. Allowing for the dissemination of multiple images, the print medium has proven especially relevant to artists wishing to convey timely social messages to a broad public.

The eleven artists included are Ron Adams, Radcliffe Bailey, Romare Bearden, John Biggers, Robert Blackburn, Elizabeth Catlett, Willie Cole, Jacob Lawrence, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, and Cheryl Warrick.

Indelible: African American prints from the Hallmark Art Collection
February 2–August 29, 2015
Hallmark Visitors Center, Kansas City, Missouri

Learn more about the exhibit, visit http://www.hallmarkvisitorscenter.com/What-Youll-See/Detail/Indelible
Kehinde Wiley and Other Prominent Artists Honored by State Department
January 5, 2015 8:28 pm Comments Off on Kehinde Wiley and Other Prominent Artists Honored by State Department
Secretary of State John Kerry presented the second U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts on January 21, 2015. Hallmark Art Collection artists Kehinde Wiley, Julie Mehretu and Sam Gilliam were among the artists honored by The Department of State’s office of Art in Embassies (AIE). The seven artists will be honored for their outstanding commitment and contributions to the AIE program and international cultural exchange.

Art in Embassies was initiated by the Museum of Modern Art in 1953, and formalized as part of the Department of State by the Kennedy Administration in 1963. One of the United States’ premier arts organizations, AIE’s public-private partnership has engaged over 20,000 individual and institutional participants in over 200 venues in 190 countries worldwide.

Over the past 52 years, AIE has played a leading role in U.S. public diplomacy by promoting cross-cultural dialogue through the visual arts, and by sponsoring dynamic artist exchanges worldwide. In 2012 AIE initiated the biennial U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts award to formally acknowledge artists who have played an instrumental role in promoting creativity, collaboration and understanding in support of American diplomacy.

To learn more about Art in Embassies, visit http://art.state.gov