Williamsburg Pagoda (Primary Title)
Richard Artschwager, American, 1923–2013 (Artist)
“It was Formica which touched it off. Formica, the great ugly material, the horror of the age, which I came to like suddenly because I was sick of looking at all this beautiful wood.” —Richard Artschwager
Artschwager’s work, like that of his Pop Art peers, focuses on American domestic culture and its icons. Williamsburg Pagoda, which features an image of the arsenal in Colonial Williamsburg framed by panels of Formica, raises ironic questions about conventional notions of old and new, reality and illusion.
The arsenal dates from 1715 and stands in an otherwise mostly reconstructed environment. Rows of bushes in the foreground recede in classical single-point perspective, culminating at the pagoda’s peak. The painting’s beveled edges push the image toward the viewer, yet the Formica panels above and below help set it back in space: the brown panel, like wainscoting in a period room, suggests that the image appears out a window, and the white panel seems to form a ceiling. Artschwager’s play with spatial illusion and his unlikely combination of banal, modern materials with an 18th-century subject is meant, the artist says, “to make you stop, reconsider, look.”
Beyond the Frame: American Art, 1960-1990, Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan, July 6 – August 18, 1991; National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan, August 29 – September 29, 1991; Fukuoka Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan, November 15 – December 15, 1991
Richard Artschwager, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, January 21 – April 3, 1988; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, June 16 – August 14, 1988; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, September 27, 1988 – January 8, 1989; Palacio Velasquez, Madrid, Spain, February 10 – April 2, 1989; Musee d'art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France, July 4 – September 17, 1989; Stadtische Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf, Germany, September 29 – November 12, 1989
Late Twentieth Century Art from the Sydney and Frances Lewis Foundation Collection, Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS, January 31 – March 14, 1982; University Memorial Gallery, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, January 30 – March 13, 1983; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY, March 25 – May 25, 1983; Muscarelle Museum, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, February 4 – April 14, 1984; Huntington Galleries, Huntington, WV, June 2 – August 19, 1984; The Athenaeum, Alexandria, VA, May 7 – June 2, 1985
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