From rural houses to home plate. (Current and Coming).

Two exhibitions at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City provide the perfect summer escape from the turmoil of city living. The first transports the visitor to the rural byways of upstate New York, and the second takes you out to the ballpark. Drawn Home: Fritz Vogt's Rural America was organized by the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York, and is on view at the Folk Art Museum until September 21. It includes some twenty-seven architectural portraits, mostly of farmsteads, but also of commercial buildings and other structures.

Fritz G. Vogt arrived in the United States from Germany in 1890, and for the next decade he traveled, mostly on foot, through the region around Albany, New York, primarily in Montgomery and Schoharie counties, but occasionally he ventured into Fulton, Otsego, and Herkimer counties. He stopped wherever he could solicit a commission to draw a farm or a house, and since each of some two hundred drawings he executed bears the location and a date, one can follow his route from commission to commission. The artist's life is otherwise poorly documented, although we do know that each year he plied his trade between March and December, and he may have found shelter in an almshouse during the winter The drawings he made between 1890 and 1894 were accomplished solely in pencil, with the aid of a ruler and other drafting tools. Then, abruptly Vogt began to use colored pencils. During his earliest period he generally drew on 18-by-24-inch sheets of paper. Then, starting in 1895, be used larger sheets to a maximum of 28 by 40 inches.

Vogt's obsession with detail worked well with the proud owner's presumed instruction to capture as much as possible of the scene. Scholars have interpreted the skewed perspective and abnormal scale in Vogt's drawings as deliberate. By disregarding traditional perspective, Vogt was able to illustrate as many buildings as possible and to show them from more than one angle. Thus, frequently two and sometimes three sides of a building are shown. As is pointed out by Douglas Kendall in the exhibition catalogue, Vogt's neat and orderly renderings have much in common with the images in atlases and county histories that were illustrated with lithographs of similar scenes. These were sold by subscription and were immensely popular from the Civil War to the end of the ...