Untitled Landscape, from the New York State series

Painting from his studio on the Bowery in Manhattan, Joseph DiGiorgio celebrated nature in his painting Untitled Landscape. As far back as the Hudson River School, the interplay between nature and culture has been central to artistic and philosophical debates within American society. While many of the nineteenth-century paintings in our permanent collection reflect this debate through traditional views of an expansive landscape with subjects within, DiGiorgio’s work places us in the mind’s eye of the artist, immersed completely in the wooded landscape. Our visual experience is enhanced by bands of gestural, abstract brushstrokes in radiant fall colors overlaid by a veil of pointillist dots and a strong vertical rhythm of tree trunks.