Florida in the Frame
A course on Florida Art
- Labels by UF Students -
This "digital brochure" offers seven views of art from the Sam and Robbie Vickers collection of Florida Art on view in Florida Impressions. During the Fall of 2021, seven students enrolled in IDH2952 UnCommon Art - Florida in the Frame, spent the semester studying the exhibition, exploring the museum, conversing with scholars and reflecting on art. Each student selected one work of art for deeper inquiry and further reflection, seeking to better understand that work and to communicate their insights. You are invited to read these below.
Read more about the course in the Spring 2022 issue of the Harn Magazine - harn.ufl.edu/magazine.
Theresa Ferber Bernstein.
Florida Water Tower. c. 1918
Theresa Bernstein seemed to paint Florida Water Tower precisely as she saw it, using rapid, loose brushwork, and without unnecessary embellishments or radical changes. As a visitor from the urban Northeast, she may have found Florida an unruly wilderness, reflected in the overgrown flora displacing signs of human presence. Here, a mere water tower in the distance embodies human influence as foliage clusters about and visually subsumes it. This water tower seems to rust as nature flourishes, suggesting humanity’s lack of permanence.
The wildness of nature in Florida starkly opposes the crisp lines, grey sidewalks, and sleek buildings of New York and Philadelphia, which she identified as home (and which she also painted – see her New York Street, below). The blazing southern sun further seems to melt her paints on the canvas leaving thick layers joined by a plastic sheen. In her Florida Water Tower, the idea of man altering nature seems to collapse at its base. The cause, she suggests: the richness of the earth beneath her. It is the foundation of the untamed nature creating this overwhelming sensation. The dark browns and tans of the soil at her feet drift above her as she follows the silhouetted trees to the skyline. The lofty tree branches pierce through the sky, making a normally crystal blue environment indistinguishable from the rich soil that fastens these trees’ roots.
The lean, singular water tower attempts to add its own touch of rusted copper to this neutral color palette, still unable to make a strong mark in the thickly coated expanse of nature’s influence. Combined with the dark soil, the muddied horizon intermingles with the white wispiness of the clouds to become smeared in whimsical swirls across the sky. This is Bernstein’s Florida landscape: limitless vertically, horizontally, and in influence, ensuring it envelops man rather than the contrary.
-Maeve Barger
Theresa Ferber Bernstein.
New York Street, ca. 1912
Oil on canvas, 24 x 20 1/16 inches
Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX
Franz Josef Bolinger.
Hurricane in Miami. 1927
Living in South Florida for the majority of his life, Franz Josef Bolinger is known as a Florida landscape artist, renowned mostly for his paintings of the Everglades. Following a record-breaking hurricane in 1926 that battered the newly-developing Miami area, Bolinger depicted the event with leaning palms and billowing leaves capturing the powerful winds and setting the menacing mood of the storm with mostly dark bluish hues, subtly outlined in flecks of green and purple. The umbrous scene is contrasted by light shining through a cloud-covered sky and onto the roof of a lone dwelling, with the rest of the structure smothered in shadows. As Miami was growing quickly – the natural scene portrayed would soon be a relic of preindustrial South Beach, many of the new residents were unprepared for a devastating hurricane. According to news reports they congregated outside during the calm eye only for the storm to be back in full force with Category 4 winds minutes later.* Bolinger’s image captures an alluring moment of nighttime beauty that perhaps lulls the viewer into a similar false sense of safety.
-Ryan Ritter
- *Weather Forecast Office, Miami, Florida, National Weather Service, “Memorial Web Page for the 1926 Great Miami Hurricane," https://www.weather.gov/mfl/miami_hurricane
David Davidovich Burliuk.
Fishing Pier, Bradenton. Undated.
In this idyllic coastal scene David Burliuk captures the quiet happenings of an afternoon in Bradenton, Florida. The warmth of the sun, bright colors and birds on the beach bring the viewer into the painting. The broad path opening to the bottom of the canvas invites the viewer to walk right onto the shoreline. He creates the effect of a calm breeze with small visible brush strokes in the sea, sky, and tree branches. The figures dotting the canvas add to this sense of movement as they draw the eye to interesting moments. Burliuk was always interested in depicting movement that the eye cannot see directly. Here he uses brushstrokes to create normally imperceptible movement in the sand and sky. This also creates a heavy impasto texture in corners of the work that reach out to the viewer physically.
Burliuk painted this work towards the end of his life when he frequently took trips to Florida. His soft-edge seaside landscape is less political than his early works based in Futurism, an art early 20th century movement designed to capture on canvas the fast-pace and political conflict of modern experience. The shift in mood can be seen by comparing this Bradenton work to one of his earlier paintings Children of Stalingrad, 1922. His works during his time in Florida avoid overt political and social conflict and present a unified and cohesive scene in contrast to the lurching dynamism of Stalingrad. In this painting of a fishing pier, we see Burliuk employing some of the same stylistic techniques of vibrant colors and visible brushstrokes he had used in his more political works. Instead of creating chaotic scenes focused on Russian laborers, his work in Florida is serene and welcoming. This painting avoids a specific human subject and instead embraces the beauty of nature as a pleasure in which to immerse oneself.
-Carolyn Lightsey
Emmett John Fritz.
Old Country Store, Mandarin, Florida. 2020.18.886
George Bertrand Mitchell.
Post Office, Mandarin. Undated
Both Emmett John Fritz and George Bertrand Mitchell were drawn to paint the same quaint post office, hidden under a lush canopy of trees that served as the center of a small community called Mandarin, right by the St. Johns River in Florida. However, the artists portray the small building through different lenses. Mitchell depicts a newly constructed post office serving as a communal hub, in which the viewer’s eyes are immediately directed to the people in the painting. They help create a busy, bright environment that allows the post office to be depicted as the center of activity in the slow-paced rural town. The Black shoppers and workers reflect a period of time where Mandarin was more diverse than today. The livestock – a mule hitched to the wagon, and a sow with piglets roaming the grounds – indicate how important animals were to the community. The moment, frozen in time, leaves the viewer wondering what the conversations could be about or how these characters live their daily lives. Indeed, the direct glance of the woman in the foreground seems to address viewers as if they belong to the scene.
Fritz, on the other hand, focuses less on the people of Mandarin, and more on the serene scene with muted colors surrounding the worn building. The shadows create a quiet atmosphere, one that gives the post office an old, familiar feeling. The bending of the tree trunks and the sunlight randomly poking holes through the canopy creates a strong appreciation for Florida’s unique nature, and the red of the newly-installed gas pump serves as a juxtaposition to the deteriorating, dark building behind it, and stands out from the tranquil Florida trees and hydrangeas. The addition of the gas pump to the scene elucidates the progress of Mandarin from rural orange groves to the busy community that stands there today.
-Andrew Goldsmith
Everett Shinn.
Saturday Night at the Ringling Hotel, Sarasota, Florida. 1949
Everett Shinn’s Saturday Night at the Ringling Hotel, Sarasota, Florida places the viewer inside the El Verona Hotel. The hotel, designed by the active Sarasota architect Dwight James Baum, was aptly advertised as the “Aristocrat of Beauty” when it opened in 1926. Three years later John Ringling of the Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus bought the property renaming it the John Ringling Hotel. John Ringling North, his nephew, introduced the circus theme into the hotel, including performances, as depicted here, by trapeze artists and aerialists soaring from the wooden beams of the dining room. Shinn was one of the lucky guests to attend this spectacle. Shinn lived in New York for a large part of his life where he was a member of the Ash Can School, a group of artists committed to painting the everyday moments of the city.
Shinn progressed from depicting the drama of the streets to the drama of theatre, where his focus stayed for many of his later works. The aerialists in this painting arc through the air in poses like those of the figures in the old master painting that hang on the walls behind them. The particularly high placement of the aerialists brings the audience center stage, perhaps so we can take note of their enthrallment as they gape and lean in from their bright crimson chairs. Indeed, this vivid color insists that we see not just the performers, but their audience as well. Shinn frequently focused on interactions such as this between the audience and the performance possibly to provoke reflection on our own fascination with the sensational.
-Casey Miller
Laura Woodward.
View of Lake Worth. Undated
Laura Woodward's View of Lake Worth depicts the royal poinciana as the central focus of the painting, with native trees and a distant blue lake in the background. the poinciana’s brilliant blossoms seem to glimmer as the light shines on them. A path among the trees opens to the bottom of the frame where it seems to flow into the viewer’s world inviting them to simply walk into Woodward’s painted landscape. The appealing path along with the captivating portrayal of nature, draws the viewer into experiencing a Florida almost untouched by man. Woodward returned to the theme of the poinciana repeatedly, producing sketches of individual flowers, drawings of trees, and full-scale paintings like the one shown here. In doing so, she captured multiple aspects of the poinciana tree.
Although best known in Florida for its vibrant red-orange flowers, in other places like Puerto Rico, there are species of the tree that have either vibrant orange or yellow flowers. Although the tree is ubiquitous in many parts of South Florida and Puerto Rico, the royal poinciana hails from Madagascar. It was only later that the tree was introduced to the western hemisphere. In Puerto Rico, the tree was supposedly introduced by New Britain locals, while botanist David Fairchild has been said to have introduced the tree into the Miami locale.
-Steven Robles
N.C. Wyeth.
Jody and Flag. 1938
N.C. Wyeth’s Jody and Flag is one of a series of paintings he created to be made into color illustrations for the 1939 edition of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Yearling. The artwork, used as the endpaper illustration for the novel, shows the defining characters of The Yearling playing in the wild North Central Florida backwoods of the 1870’s. Wyeth fills the landscape with an abundance of native Florida plant life including saw palmettos and live oak trees.
The scene shows Jody Baxter, a young boy from an impoverished farming family, and his beloved adopted fawn Flag. In this piece, as well as many of his other works, Wyeth’s use of light is deliberate and strategic. The bright white light shining behind Flag’s head emphasizes the fawn artistically in the composition while also letting viewers know that Flag is not merely an ordinary deer. Wyeth’s use of light establishes that Flag is special to Jody and may represent the larger theme of innocence within the narrative. Wyeth’s painting suggests a loving relationship between Jody and Flag as the pair is pictured running through a brightly lit clearing in parallel poses across the canvas. Jody and Flag share an aligned movement within the otherwise still scene, and Jody’s legs almost exactly mimic the position of Flag’s forelimbs. In fact, the springing of Jody’s back foot creates a shape that appears similar to that of Flag’s hoof. The affectionate nature of their friendship is further defined as Jody looks back towards Flag with the hint of a warm smile spreading across his face.
This is mirrored throughout The Yearling, in which Jody bonds with Flag and matures alongside him, developing an immense fondness for the fawn. In a sad twist of fate, Jody is forced into maturity by having to make a choice between Flag and the wellbeing of his family. Wyeth’s depiction of this heartwarming scene shows the playful, innocent love that Jody has for Flag, before he is burdened by the responsibilities he will later face in the difficult "world of men."
-Kaitlyn McCarty
IDH2952 UnCommon Art
Florida in the Frame
We gratefully acknowledge the UF faculty members who graciously shared their expertise in meeting with students in the course Florida in the Frame.
- Jack Davis, UF History
- Jessica Harland-Jacobs, UF History
- Jack Putz, UF Biology
Image Credits:
All works, The Florida Art Collection, Gift of Samuel H. and Roberta T. Vickers.
Photographs by Foad Seyed Mohammadi
Theresa Ferber Bernstein, American, born Poland, 1890–2002
Florida Water Tower
c. 1918
Oil on board
2020.18.247
Franz Josef Bolinger, American, 1903–1986
Hurricane in Miami
1927
Oil on canvas
2020.18.73
David Davidovich Burliuk, American, born Russia, 1882–1967
Fishing Pier, Bradenton
Undated
Oil on canvas
2020.18.479
Emmett John Fritz, American, 1917–1995
Old Country Store, Mandarin, Florida
Undated
Oil on canvas
2020.18.886
George Bertrand Mitchell, American, 1874–1966
Post Office, Mandarin
Undated
Oil on canvas
2020.18.58
Everett Shinn, American, 1876–1953
Saturday Night at the Ringling Hotel, Sarasota, Florida
1949
Oil on canvas
2020.18.414
Laura Woodward, American, 1834–1926
View of Lake Worth
Undated
Oil on canvas
2020.18.273
N.C. Wyeth, American, 1882–1945
Jody and Flag
1938
Oil on pressed wood panel
2020.18.512