The Muscatine Art Center will provide visitors with an escape from Iowa winter with the opening of an exhibition of works by Beth Van Hoesen. This exhibition will be the first opportunity for the public to view the twenty-six prints and drawings of flowers gifted to the Art Center in 2012. The exhibition will be on view from February 1 through June 16, 2013.

Van Hoesen's flowers are richly colored and draw attention to the idea of art being all around us. Van Hoesen takes everyday objects and highlights the sublime hidden in small things. Her works are nearly scientific in detail but also quite charming.

For much of her career, Van Hoesen functioned outside of the "fleeting and fashionable" movements of the time. Van Hoesen was a realist when many artists tended towards abstraction. Her printmaking technique was highly regarded, and her work is represented in the collections of major art museums. These include the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Art Institute of Chicago, Boise Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Cincinnati Art Museum, Honolulu Academy of Arts, Smithsonian Institution and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Born in Boise, Idaho in 1926, Van Hoesen studied art at Stanford University, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1948. After graduating from Stanford she studied art in France and later at the California School of Fine Arts (San Francisco Art Institute). Her career spanned more than five decades.

The E. Mark Adams and Beth Van Hoesen Trust of San Francisco, California gifted the works to the Muscatine Art Center. The collection includes the medias of graphite, colored pencil, watercolor, aquatint, etching, drypoint, engraving and lithography.

The Muscatine Art Center is located at 1314 Mulberry Avenue in Muscatine, Iowa. Hours are Tuesday through Friday from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Thursday evenings until 7:00 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. Admission is free. Donations are appreciated.

The public is invited to join the Muscatine Art Center in welcoming Carol Ehlers, art history speaker, as she presents a 45 minute lecture on the art of Russian artist Marc Chagall. The lecture will take place Thursday, November 15, 2012 at 5:30 pm in the Muscatine Art Center's Music Room. Admission is free.

Marc Chagall was a Russian artist associated with several major artistic styles and was one of the most successful artists of the 20th century. He was an early modernist and created works in virtually every artistic medium, including painting, book illustrations, stained glass windows, stage sets, ceramics, tapestries and fine art prints. Chagall did not want his work to be associated with any school or movement and considered his own personal language of symbols and motifs to be meaningful only to him.

Marc Chagall was born July 7, 1887 in Vitebsk, Belarus, then part of the Russian empire. He received his primary education at the local religious school, where he studied Hebrew and the Torah. He soon began copying images from books and found the experience so rewarding he decided he wanted to become an artist.

At the age of 19 he moved to St. Petersburg which was then the capital of Russia and the center of the country's artistic life. After a few months at the art school there, Chagall realized that academic portrait painting did not suit his desires and relocated to Paris, where he remained until 1914. After Paris he returned to his village of Vitebsk where he founded Vitebsk Arts College, which became one of the most distinguished schools of art in the Soviet Union.

In 1941 at the age of 54 he traveled to America where he discovered he had already achieved international fame. Initially, Chagall's fellow artists did not understand or even like his art, but those attitudes began to change when the son of French artist Henri Matisse became his representative. After several successful years in America, Chagall returned to France where he spent the remainder of his life. He died in Paris on March 28, 1985 at the age of 98.

In 1992 the Muscatine Art Center's collections were significantly enriched by a gift of twenty-seven works of art by Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse, Degas, Boudin, Chagall, Renoir, and other European artists. The collection was a gift from the estate of Mary Musser Gilmore in honor of her parents, Richard Drew Musser and Sarah Walker Musser. The paintings are on permanent display in the Laura Musser Mansion.

The public is invited to join the Muscatine Art Center in welcoming Carol Ehlers, art history speaker, as she presents a 45 minute lecture on the art of the French Impressionist Edgar Degas. The lecture will take place Thursday, September 20 at 5:30 pm in the Muscatine Art Center's Music Room. Admission is free.

Edgar Degas was born on July 19, 1834 in Paris, France, the oldest of five children. Degas began to paint early in life and in 1853 he registered as a copyist in the Louvre. He exhibited at the Salon for the first time in 1865 but his painting gathered little attention.

At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Degas enlisted in the National Guard. During rifle training his eyesight was found to be defective and for the rest of his life his eye problems were a constant worry to him. From 1870 on Degas increasingly painted ballet subjects, partly because they sold well and provided him with needed income after his brother's debts had left the family bankrupt. He produced much of his greatest work during the decade beginning in 1874.

During his life, public reception of Degas' work ranged from admiration to contempt. He is considered one of the founders of Impressionism, though he preferred to be called a realist. His paintings, pastels, drawings, and sculptures are included in the collection of numerous museums around the world. Although Degas had no formal pupil he greatly influenced several important painters. His greatest admirer may have been Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

In 1992 the Muscatine Art Center's collections were significantly enriched by a gift of twenty-seven works of art by Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse, Degas, Boudin, Chagall, Renoir, and other European artists. The collection was a gift from the estate of Mary Musser Gilmore in honor of her parents, Richard Drew Musser and Sarah Walker Musser. The paintings are on permanent display in the Laura Musser Mansion.