LOWELL NESBITT

ABOUT THE WORK

Red Rose is a serigraph produced in 1985 by the American artist Lowell Nesbitt. This print epitomizes the style and subject for which the artist became most famous: oversized and realist depictions of flowers. Like the artist Georgia O'Keeffe, Nesbitt painted his botanical subjects with an academic seriousness, once saying, "I've been trying to treat the flower monumentally, to get beyond its prettiness." However, unlike O'Keeffe, Nesbitt preferred flat backgrounds, choosing black for this particular work to contrast the rose's bright coloring and to give the piece an enigmatic sexuality. While its printer is unknown, Nesbitt became a printmaker during his career and likely pulled this serigraph himself on its heavy wove paper. The Lowell Nesbitt estate published and stamped the work from where it was acquired.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Lowell Nesbitt (1933-1993) was born outside Baltimore in Towson, Maryland. While a teenager, he worked as a night watchman at Washington, DC's Phillips Collection, an experience that inspired him to become an artist. He studied at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University and London's Royal College of Art, focusing on stained glass and etching. However, Nesbitt subsequently transitioned to painting, working as an abstract expressionist and choosing provincial subjects such as clothing, produce, and the architecture of his new home, New York City.

In 1962, at the urging of Robert Indiana, Nesbitt would again transition, this time to the realist style, and chose botanical subjects such as roses, irises, and lilies. He painted these floral subjects in photorealistic and oversized depictions with stark backgrounds and on canvases as tall as thirty feet, forcing viewers to reconcile similarities between their morphology and the female body. In 1964, he debuted these floral works to acclaim during an exhibition at the Corcoran School in Washington DC, the first of 80 solo exhibitions. While painters had long shown floral subjects within staid still-lifes in the classical style, Nesbitt's unique, stylized approach was fresh and recognizable and put his works at the forefront of the Pop Art movement, alongside those of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jack Youngerman.

During his career, and in tandem with the success of his botanical works, Nesbitt continued painting other subjects and created various works through drawing, sculpting, and printmaking. In 1968, NASA named him the official artist of the Apollo 9 and 13 space missions, and he was commissioned by the US Navy and US Postal Service for a mural and stamp artwork, respectively. Today, his works occupy such collections as the American Embassy arts program, the Lincoln Center, the Chicago Institute of Art, and the Detroit Institute of Art.