Word: truettner
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Edward F. Truettner, who has worked in the club as a waiter for about 10 years, said he could not afford to visit his aged mother, who is on dialysis, this summer...
...Cole's do so? For answers, consult "Thomas Cole: Landscape into History," a show of more than 75 paintings curated by art historians William H. Truettner and Alan Wallach on view at the National Museum of American Art in Washington through Aug. 7. It is highly engaging, not least because the curators -- without imposing a modern agenda on Cole's work -- have done such an intelligent job of ferreting out what ideas of American identity he satisfied, including political ideas...
...best catalog essays are by William H. Truettner: they set out the propagandistic themes of most Western art and are especially good on the ideology of "enlightenment" that supported and sugared the cruel facts of European conquest and expansion. Solid thought and research lie behind them, and though the conservative would complain that we know the story of Manifest Destiny's barbarous self-interest, the point is that until this show, we did not know (or certainly not in such detail) about its ramifications in painting and sculpture...
...even Truettner pushes too far. For instance, he sees Emanuel Leutze's The Storming of the Teocalli by Cortez and His Troops, 1848, as a celebration of Christian virtue conquering Aztec barbarism. But the image is far more melancholy and ambiguous than that: the Spanish conquistadors are presented as brutes, one flinging a baby from the temple top, another tearing loot from a corpse; and Leutze's intent to provoke pity for the Aztecs is summed up in an upside-down torch, nearly out, which lies on the steps in the foreground, an adaptation of the classic funerary image...
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