Object Notes

Large ceramic jars made in China, Vietnam, and Thailand were among the imported objects that Dayak peoples prized highly. Often thought to possess magical powers, these vessels were handed down as heirlooms from one generation to the next.

The brutal pessimism of George Grosz's  wartime work reached its crescendo in the series of "stick-men" paintings Grosz made in the postwar years. In these haunting scenes, wraithlike figures engage in brutal acts of terror, or stand, still and horrified, in an apocalyptic landscape.

George Grosz, a flashy dresser himself, was particularly taken with the style of the cowboys and found "a certain grace" in their characteristic attire: colorful shirts, dungarees, and pointed boots that "make the biggest foot 'dainty.'" He also keenly observed their physical attitudes, describing and even demonstrating them to a reporter: "'one is motionless in the corner,' he says, 'for hours.

George Grosz's Cattle was one of the four oil paintings he created for the Impressions of Dallas

A staple of the postwar German diet and evidence of the devastation of the country in the war's aftermath, potatoes were a recurring motif in Sigmar Polke's work.

Through this work that is part contemporary sculpture, part photography, part decorative arts, artist Cindy Sherman comments on the commodification of women as objects of male fascination and desire by appropriating an 18th-century porcelain design.

George Grosz investigated downtown Dallas from street level, peering up at rising skyscrapers, and also from high above the city, where he captured a bird's-eye view of downtown Dallas, perhaps from the top of the Mercantile Bank Building, then still the tallest structure in the city.