On Friday, August 25 at 5 PM the Bass Harbor Memorial Library will host a lecture, Janet Sobel: The 20th century’s Most Influential Artist You Have Never Heard Of, presented by local artist Ed Davis.
The painting above was not painted by Jackson Pollock. It was painted by an artist who dripped paint on a canvas before Pollock began his series. Why have you not heard of this artist? Mostly because this artist was a woman. Davis will talk about this artist and how the history of art might look very different today if women artists had been taken seriously in the not so distant past.
He will also discuss a then secret government program by the CIA that propelled Pollock and others into fame despite their communist leanings at a time when Senator McCarthy was destroying the careers of many other great artists. He will explore the inner workings of the art world today that propel some artists to fame and others remain obscure and why he believes that if Leonardo daVinci were alive today he might not have become famous as an artist.
Ed Davis is a graduate of Maine Collage of Art and has a Master’s Degree from Cambridge College. He has been creating paintings and sculpture for the past sixty years and has been a guest lecturer at Boston’s Constitution Museum, the US Naval Academy in Annapolis and for a variety of private organizations.