The architecture of the building was made by Frank Essays

The architecture of the building was made by Frank Essays The architecture of the building was made by Frank Lloyd. It was formed as the Davenport Municipal Art Gallery in 1925, with the passage of a law allowing the city to accept a gift of 330 artworks from a former mayor Charles A. Ficke, and open a museum. It was renamed the Davenport Museum in 1987. It continued to be a city-run museum until the opening of its new building in 2005, which was named in honor of a gift from the V.O. and Elizabeth Kahl Figge Foundation. Mr. Ficke's original collection of European American and Spanish Viceregal art has grown through the efforts of generations of philanthropists and civ ic leaders and now includes the Grant Wood Archive and works by other American Regionalists artists, and extensive collection of European, contemporary works. The Figge has quite a bit of work in its permanent collection even though a lot of it is not on display. A lot of it is in Storage which is in the basement. They not only store and show art but they also restore the pieces to the best of their abilities. The Figge Art Museum's permanent holdings include many nationally and internationally known objects and bear witness to more than seven decades of philanthropy and civic pride. The collections, organized in seven areas, offer a distinctive look at regional, national and international at from the 15 th century to the present. The different collections consist of The American Collection, The Midwest Regionalist Collection , The Mexican Colonial C ollection, and The Haitian Collection. The American Collection includes works from the Colonial period to 1945, with particular strengths in the 19 th century landscape traditions of the Hudson River School artists Asher B. Durand, John Kensett, Albert Bierstadt and others. C.A. Ficke's original gifts in this area have been enhanced by a number of generous donations including in the Wheatfield, by Winslow Homer, and In Gentle Slumber, by George Eastman. The Midwest Regionalist Collection focuses on the works of Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry and other Midwestern artists who defined this style in the 1930s and 1940s. The Figge's Midwest Regionalist Collection boasts the only painted self-portrait of Grant Wood, whose enigmatic portrait of Midwesterners, American Gothic, is perhaps the most Recognized painting in American art. A full-color catalogue featuring work of Grant Wood. The Mexican Colonial Collection documents the growth of paintings in New Spain in the 17 th and 18 th centuries out of the traditions of European religious paintings of the same period. Many of the DMA's holdings in this area are part of the original museum gift from C.A. Ficke and are perhaps the most distinguished in the country. The Haitian Collection documents the flowering of a rich artistic tradition within the island nation of Haiti since the 1940s. In 1967, the Davenport Museum of Art established on of the first collections of Haitian art in the United States. Donations made by Dr. Walter E Neiswanger, a long-time museum patron and trustee, form the majority of th4e comprehensive collection which ranges from the first generation to the most recent developments. One piece of art at the figge that I liked a lot was one from the Midwest regionalist collection. The piece is m ade by Thomas Hart Benton, and is called Spring Storm. The composition of the painting presented many of the juxtapositions, which are things that are brought together or side to side that contrast each other. This is what Thomas Hart Benton favored. It allowed him to depic nature sculpturally, using his favorite formal principle of the "bulge and hollow," rhythmically distorting structures to achieve a serpentine line, the line favored by 16 th -century Mannerist painters. The lines draw our attention to the center of the composition, to the bolt of lightning that had startled the horse. It is not painted on the surface, but carved into it, through paint, down to the composition board beneath. If you cover one halve of the painting then it looks like its peaceful but if you do it to the side that is light then it looks like it's dark and stor my outside. The offer of Education was another piece