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Fallen Bierstadt

Valerie Hegarty

Contemporary Art

Valerie Hegarty’s Fallen Bierstadt is inspired by the work of the renowned nineteenth-century American landscape painter Albert Bierstadt (whose monumental A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie hangs to the right). Hegarty was drawn to the way nineteenth-century landscape artists depicted vast expanses of wilderness as an expression of “Manifest Destiny,” the notion that the United States was divinely entitled to expand across the entire North American continent. In Fallen Bierstadt the “canvas” appears to decay, as if affected by the ravages of nature. The title seems to refer both to the physical appearance of the piece and to the end of a heroic tradition of landscape painting.
MEDIUM Foamcore, paint, paper, glue, gel medium, canvas, wire, wood
DATES 2007
DIMENSIONS 2008.9a Wall piece: 70 × 50 × 16 3/4 in. (177.8 × 127 × 42.5 cm) 2008.9b Floor piece: 3 × 39 1/2 × 10 in. (7.6 × 100.3 × 25.4 cm)  (show scale)
COLLECTIONS Contemporary Art
ACCESSION NUMBER 2008.9a-b
CREDIT LINE Gift of Campari, USA
MUSEUM LOCATION This item is not on view
CAPTION Valerie Hegarty (American, born 1967). Fallen Bierstadt, 2007. Foamcore, paint, paper, glue, gel medium, canvas, wire, wood, 2008.9a Wall piece: 70 × 50 × 16 3/4 in. (177.8 × 127 × 42.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Campari, USA, 2008.9a-b. © artist or artist's estate (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 2008.9a-b_PS11.jpg)
IMAGE overall, 2008.9a-b_PS11.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2018
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RIGHTS STATEMENT © Valerie Hegarty
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