Berea College Art Collection

Josef Albers was a German-born, American painter known for his complex understanding of color and geometry. Albers was a student, then a professor at the Bauhaus craft and fine arts school. The Bauhaus was founded with the idea of creating a "total" work of art in which all art forms, including architecture, would eventually be [...]

Ernest Trova was a self-trained American surrealist, pop art painter, and sculptor. Trova’s most successful image was his Falling Man series which he created in both two and three dimensional media. Synthesizing post-painterly abstraction with own his own ancient brand of classicism, Trova arrived at a result that attracted immense interest. Images and sculptures of [...]

Despite the strong currents of pure abstraction during the mid-twentieth century, Dimitrie Berea forded his own path. Taking after and expanding upon the Fauves and Impressionists, Berea had exhibited internationally from the age of 19. Originally trained at the Bucharest Academy of Architecture, Berea remained in Bucharest and opened an art school, Ileana. Coming to [...]

This tea bowl is in the Tamba style: one of the six ancient styles of Japanese pottery. Tamba pottery has been made for over eight hundred years. This type of pottery gets its glassy look not from a glaze, but from the smoke and ash inside the kiln. Today, it is only made at one [...]

This piece of Temmoku was manufactured in the Fujian province of China during the Song Dynasty. The name Temmoku comes from the Japanese pronunciation of Tianmu Shan, a mountain where Japanese Buddhist Monks came to study Zen Buddhism and took this type of bowl back to Japan. Temmoku is characterized by its iron-oxide glazes, which [...]

Named after Sanogawa Ichimatsu, an 18th c. Kabuki actor who specialized in female roles, Ichimatsu dolls are an Edo era invention. They portray little Japanese girls and boys in their holiday silk kimonos and are sometimes commissioned by the rich as portraits of their children. The dolls are display objects, not toys, and are usually [...]

A tsuba is the ring that separates the handle from the blade in traditional Japanese sword making. This tsuba is a great example of late Edo period metalwork. The Edo period was characterized by a united, isolationist Japan and a long era of peace. With the extended period of peace, tsubas reached previously unheard of [...]

Chavez, an indigenous Mapuche Chilean, was a goat-herder as a child but later grew to fame for his prints. Chavez worked past his humble beginnings by attending University of Concepción and working nights. Later, he attended Pratt University in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago before settling in Germany. This print, translated as [...]

Much of Pablo Picasso’s work dealt with moving away from standard academic art forms. This textile was designed in 1956 by Pablo Picasso for Fuller Fabrics’ Modern Masters print series. The Modern Masters series included textile designs by Picasso, Míro, Warhol, Léger, Dufy, and Chagall. The textiles were sold both for clothing and for furnishings, [...]

An influential American Expressionist, Robert Motherwell was a printmaker and editor. He attended the California School of Fine Arts, received his BA in Philosophy from Stanford, and his Ph.D. from Harvard. Later, he studied at Columbia University. It was while at Stanford that Motherwell first encountered Modernism through his study of Symbolist literature. His fascination [...]