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Label from 2014.It's All American:
Joseph Konopka enjoyed “painting subjects that make me happy, that make me feel good.” In this painting he depicted a typically American scene of an Independence Day celebration in a suburban backyard. The young woman seems to be very patriotic; her cupcakes are decorated with American flags, and she’s dressed in the same colors.
Life in suburbia was an important theme for the Photorealists, reflecting the fact that many Americans moved to suburbia in the prosperous post-war years. Even Lucy and Ricky of television’s “I Love Lucy” left New York City for suburban Connecticut in 1956. Konopka himself lived in suburban New Jersey, commuting daily into NYC for his job as a scenic designer at NBC.
Like many Photorealists, Konopka used colored slides to capture the scene he intended to paint. But his works are not painted in microscopic detail. Instead the modeling/shading of his forms is highly simplified in places but appears to be realistic from a distance.Label
2024, "Beyond the Iron Curtain: Visions from the Cold War"
The female figure in Joseph Konopka’s painting 4th of July looks carefully down at a tray of white frosted cupcakes topped with decorative American flags. Set in what appears to be a backyard barbeque, the scene initially resembles a carefree celebration of a national holiday. In 1974, the year the painting was made, however, many Americans did not feel very patriotic. Protests raged throughout the country against America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, one of many proxy wars that defined the Cold War, which had claimed the lives of tens of thousands of American soldiers. The abstraction of highlights and shadows into simplified blocks of color recalls the early 20th-century style of Precisionism, which was used to depict the excitement of early American urbanization. The muted colors, however, are reminiscent of an old photo that has faded over time. In this light, perhaps Konopka’s painting represents a nostalgia for the idealism of the past, when patriotism came more easily.
Text by Kana Furuichi, Washburn student, and Madeline Eschenburg, Washburn instructor