The Muscatine Art Center is pleased to announce a gift to the permanent collection of twenty-six prints and drawings by American artist Beth Van Hoesen from the E. Mark Adams and Beth Van Hoesen Trust of San Francisco, California. Van Hoesen was known for her detailed and technically masterful drawings and prints, and the gifted work includes the medias of graphite, colored pencil, watercolor, aquatint, etching, drypoint, engraving, and lithography.
Born in Boise, Idaho in 1926, Van Hoesen studied art at Stanford University, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1948. After graduating from Stanford she studied art in France and later at the California School of Fine Arts (San Francisco Art Institute).
In a career spanning more than five decades Beth Van Hoesen created a remarkable body of graphic art. At a time when most contemporary art was conceptual or abstract, she chose to pursue drawing and printmaking in an academic manner, reminiscent of the centuries old tradition of draftsmanship that includes the work of Albrecht Durer and Hans Holbein.
Van Hoesen's depiction of flowers has many antecedents in the still-life tradition. The prints and drawings that are included in the gift to the Muscatine Art Center all depict flowers, either solo, where they are almost portrait-like and evocative of the flowers done by Georgia O'Keeffe; or in her delicate, but more formal still-lives such as her suites of prints entitled "Cups of Flowers" where she concerns herself with the small pleasures of the arrangement and the decorative elements of the cups.
Museums with works by Beth Van Hoesen in their collections include the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Art Institute of Chicago, Boise Art Museum; Brooklyn Museum; Cincinnati Art Museum; Honolulu Academy of Arts; Smithsonian Institution; University Museums, Iowa State University; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and numerous other institutions.
A special exhibition of the prints and drawings of Beth Van Hoesen that have been gifted to the Muscatine Art Center is scheduled February 1- March 31, 2013 in the Musser Museum Gallery of the Muscatine Art Center.
