Jewelry

Artist Don Eddy (American, born 1944)

Date1974

DimensionsH: 40 in. (101.6 cm); W: 52 1/8 in. (132.4 cm)

MediumAcrylic on canvas.

ClassificationPaintings

Credit LineNational Endowment for the Arts Museum Purchase Plan Program and matching funds from an anonymous donor

Object number

1975.7

Not on View

Label TextThe jewelry in that window…allowed me to further break down the color units and thus explore an alternate way of understanding the spatial impact of color. I wanted to examine color in such a way that it would primarily be understood “musically” or “rhythmically.” A color would be made meaningful because of the colors that were adjacent to it, but not necessarily in relation to a color or colors at some distance from it. That idea built series of linear, rhythmic paths across the surface of the painting. One of a number of artists of the late 1960s and 1970s known as Photorealists, Don Eddy painted images that resemble the way that photographs depict visual reality—the camera’s flattening effect, the incidental detail it picks up, the cropping of a scene. In fact, the composition of Jewelry is based on several color photographs that Eddy made of the display window of DuBoff’s jewelry store at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue in New York. Using an airbrush, Eddy layered numerous thin coats of acrylic paint to achieve the candy colors and slick, hyper-real quality of the painting.Published ReferencesToledo Museum of Art, The Toledo Museum of Art, American Paintings, Toledo, 1979, pp. 43-44, pl. 276.

Neff, John Hallmark, "Painting and Perception: Don Eddy," Arts, vol. 54, no. 4, Dec. 1979, pp. 99, 101, repr. (col.) fig. 3.

Meisel, Louis K., Photo-realism, New York, 1980, repr. (col.), p. 196.

Schaefer, Claire, "Instructional Resources," Art Education, vol. 42, no. 6, Nov. 1989, p. 26, repr. (col.) p. 25.

Exhibition HistoryToledo Museum of Art, Image, Color and Form: Paintings by Eleven Americans, 1975, no. 11, repr. (cat. by R. Phillips).

Williamstown (MA), Williams College Museum of Art, Don Eddy, 1975, repr. (cat. by J. Neff).

Framingham (MA), Danforth Museum, Aspects of the 70's: Direction in Realism, 1980, p. 6, repr. p. 8.