This October during London’s Frieze Week, Christie’s will present the
largest and most diverse selection of 12 works by Francis Bacon and
Lucian Freud, two British masters of the 20th century.
The group is led by Francis Bacon’s Figure in Movement(1972,
estimate on request), held for 41 years in the prestigious collection
of Magnus Konow. The work is a poignant meditation on human existence,
expressed through the memory of Bacon’s muse and lover George Dyer,
whose tragic suicide took place less than thirty-six hours before the
opening of Bacon’s career-defining retrospective at the Grand Palais,
and had a devastating impact upon the artist. Within Bacon’s oeuvre, Figure in Movement sits
at the centre of the black triptychs.
In addition, a collection of some
of the earliest works on record by Bacon, comprises six pieces
including his earliest surviving large-scale work, Painted Screen (circa 1930),
a precursor to his famed triptychs. On loan to Tate, London, since
2009, the collection bears an outstanding provenance that includes
Bacon’s first patron Eric Allden and his early artistic mentor Roy de
Maistre. In the 1940s, five of the works entered the family collection
of Francis Elek, who met Allden around this time; he acquired the sixth
following de Maistre’s death in 1968.
Similarly, Lucian Freud’s early Man in a Striped Shirt (1942,
estimate: £1,000,000-1,500,000), created when the artist was 19, also
from the collection of Magnus Konow, is presented alongside a still-life
celebrating the artist’s love for his wife Caroline Blackwood, and a
1980 portrait of his friend and lover Susanna Chancellor. Two of the
first studies of Francis Bacon Freud created in 1951 are also included.
Selected works from this group will be on view at Christie’s Hong Kong
(4-7 September), Los Angeles (5-8 September), New York (15-18 September)
and King Street from 28 September, ahead of the auction on 4 October
2018.
FRANCIS BACON: EARLY WORKS
In
1939, Francis Elek came to England from Czechoslovakia as part of a
swimming team, and became separated from his family at the outbreak of
conflict in Europe. It was whilst searching for them through the Red
Cross after the war that he met Allden, and subsequently acquired the
majority of the present collection in the late 1940s. The collection
represents some of the very first works in Bacon’s catalogue raisonné,
capturing the birth of one of the twentieth century’s greatest artistic
voices. Collectively, they chronicle Bacon’s formative influences,
blending his early interests in furniture design with the contemporary
innovations of the European avant-garde.
Few works remain from this
seminal period: in addition to Painted Screen (circa 1930, estimate: £700,000-1,000,000) the present group includes the earliest surviving oil on canvas,
Painting, (1929-30, estimate: £450,000-650,000),
while an early work on paper, Gouache (1929, estimate: £180,000-220,000), is testament to Bacon’s early fascination with interior architecture and design.
Francis
Bacon’s rugs shine a vital light on the relationship between art and
design in his early practice, the present three belong to a group of
just 12 surviving examples (All: Rug, circa 1929,
estimate £70,000-100,000). Frequently hung on the wall like paintings,
inspired perhaps by the tapestries of Jean Lurçat, their bold geometric
designs owe much to Bacon’s interests in Synthetic Cubism and the
Bauhaus movement, encountered during his time in Berlin and Paris
between 1927 and 1928.
Unseen in public until 2011, Francis Bacon by
Lucian Freud (both 1951, estimates: £500,000-700,000) belong to an
outstanding group of three studies that represent Freud’s first depictions of Bacon, the third was in the collection of R. B. Kitaj and
sold by Christie’s in the estate sale of 2008 for £468,500, against an
estimate of £100,000-150,000. The studies are among the most intimate
records of one of the 20th century’s
greatest artistic relationships. They depict Bacon in a spontaneous
moment of characteristic irreverence: shirt and trousers unbuttoned,
eyes downcast, hips flexed and chest bared. Freud found great
inspiration in Bacon’s impulsive painterly language while Bacon
appreciated his companion’s witty vitality.
Left: Lucian Freud, Man in a Striped Shirt (1942, estimate: £1,000,000-1,500,000) Right: Lucian Freud, Still Life with Zimmerlinde (circa 1950, estimate: £400,000-600,000)
Painted when Lucian Freud was just 19 years old, Man in a Striped Shirt (1939,
estimate: £1,000,000-1,500,000) is a rare early work that bears witness
to the young artist’s talent. Richard Chopping was a fellow student of
the East Anglian School of Art in Dedham, and also a friend of Francis
Bacon, appearing in the 1978 diptych Two Studies for Portrait of Richard Chopping.
Freud’s painting is charged with his uncompromising eye for the
specific, studying Chopping’s distinctive features with the intense
focus typical of Freud’s earliest paintings.
Executed in the early 1950s, Still Life with Zimmerlinde (circa 1950,
estimate: £400,000-600,000) is an intimate study of a zimmerlinde, more
commonly known in English as a house lime, dedicated to his second
wife, Caroline Blackwood. One heart-shaped leaf dominates the
composition, its serrated outline faithfully traced and its bright,
backlit green surface exposing every vein. To the lower left, the image
is cut short by a swathe of still-raw canvas in which Freud has written,
in his distinctive rounded hand, ‘For Caroline / with all my love /
Lucian’.
Gifted by Lucian Freud to the current owner, Head of a Woman (circa 1980,
estimate: £350,000-450,000) stands among the artist’s earliest
depictions of Susanna Chancellor. Freud first met her when she was just
seventeen years old and the two quickly fell into a passionate
relationship that would continue in various guises until the artist’s
death in 2011. However, it was not until nearly 20 years into their
friendship that Freud would begin to depict Susanna, coinciding with a
renewed focus on his familial circle.
Executed in 1972, Figure in Movement takes
its place among an extraordinary group of works painted in the
aftermath of George Dyer’s tragic death the previous year. In the hustle
between figuration and abstraction, Bacon creates a vivid sense of the
transition from life to death, transforming Dyer’s distinctive features
into commentary on the fleeting nature of life. Figure in Movement sheds
critical light on Bacon’s understanding of the human condition during
this period. Laced with allusions to photography, literature, reportage
and film, it is an attempt to visualise the ways in which figural traces
continue to live in the mind: Dyer is simultaneously reincarnated and
estranged, his likeness skewed to the point of ambiguity and mirrored
imperfectly in billowing black. Included in Bacon’s 1983 touring
retrospective in Japan, as well as his 2016 exhibition at the Grimaldi
Forum in Monaco, Figure in Movement demonstrates
the new artistic directions he pursued during the 1970s, with the
period following Dyer’s death seeing a move away from the characterful
portraits of Bacon’s 1960s Soho circle towards dark, existential
meditations on mortality.
Christie’s has announced An American Place: The Barney A. Ebsworth Collection, will be offered in a dedicated evening and day sale in November as a highlight of its flagship 20th Century Week in
New York. The collection of Barney A. Ebsworth represents an
extraordinary achievement in the history of collecting — a singular
assemblage of over 85 artworks that illuminates the rise of American art
across the 20th century. Highlights of the collection include Edward Hopper’sChop Suey, 1929, the most important work by the artist still in private hands (estimate in the region of $70 million), Jackson Pollock’sComposition with Red Strokes (estimate in the region of $50 million) and Willem de Kooning’sWoman as Landscape (estimate in the region of $60 million).
A global tour of highlights will commence in Paris 6-9 September,
coinciding with La Biennale Paris, followed by highlight exhibitions in
New York, Hong Kong, London, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and
culminating with the auction preview at Christie’s Rockefeller Galleries
in New York. The tour in Paris will include works by Hopper, Pollock,
de Kooning, Kline, Nadelman, Davis, Sheeler, O’Keeffe and Glackens. The
collection is expected to realize in excess of $300 million.
Marc Porter, Chairman, Christie’s Americas, commented:
“Last
season, Christie’s made the bold move of launching the $835 million
Collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller in Asia, underscoring our
investment and deep commitment to collectors in this growing region.
This season, Christie’s Paris will host the debut of this stunning
collection for the global collecting community, positioning it in the
heart of Europe and paying homage to Barney A. Ebsworth’s lifelong love
affair with the city that first introduced him to great art. His unique
journey as a collector resonates with the influence and art historical
connections of Gertrude Stein’s Paris, and ultimately set a new high
standard for the creation of a nuanced collection of 20thCentury Art
that is without parallel in its exceptional depth and quality.”
“AN AMERICAN PLACE” – COLLECTION HIGHLIGHTS
As a tribute to the former Stieglitz gallery, Ebsworth bestowed the
name “An American Place” on his home in Seattle, which was built in
collaboration with architect Jim Olson and designed as a dialogue
between art and architecture. Ebsworth’s credo in collecting was
“quality, quality, quality,” and with that mindset he amassed the most
comprehensive collection of American Modernism in private hands, with
many works having been loaned to leading institutions throughout his
years of ownership.
A seminal composition within the landscape of American Modernism, Edward Hopper’s Chop Sueywas
one of Mr. Ebsworth’s most prized possessions (estimate in the
region of $70 million). Possibly derived from a Cantonese phrase, tsap sui,
meaning ‘odds and ends,’ chop suey referred not only to a low-cost
stir-fry dish but, moreover, to a public destination where the societal
fusion of different cultural elements of the modern city came together.
As in his masterwork Nighthawks (1942, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois), Hopper’s 1929 painting Chop Suey distills
the atmosphere of this everyday eatery into a cinematic scene that at
once depicts an implicit narrative while creating clear allusions to
broader themes of social isolation, gender roles and art historical
tradition. While having its roots in the French Impressionist and Ashcan
traditions of painting city life, Chop Suey incorporates a
thoroughly modern play of light and color to capture a specific
restaurant that the Hoppers frequented on the Upper West Side of New
York. The most important painting by Hopper left in private hands, Chop Suey epitomizes
the psychologically complex meditations for which the artist is best
known, while uniquely capturing the zeitgeist of New York during one of
its most interesting eras of transition. Chop Suey was included
in the groundbreaking retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris
2012-13, which broke attendance records for the location.
Willem de Kooning’s Woman as Landscape is a
tour-de-force of 20th century painting (estimate in the region of $60
million). Executed at the height of the artist’s career in 1955, this
large-scale canvas belongs to a small group of works that are well
positioned among the most powerful paintings in American art. Measuring
over five and a half feet tall, Woman as Landscape is a heroic
painting that encompasses the painterly bravado and radical use of color
that singled out de Kooning as a leader of the Abstract Expressionist
movement, and one of the pre-eminent painters of his generation. The
shocking female forms sensationalized the art world, energizing and
scandalizing in equal measure, but his vivid brushwork came to represent
the dramatic shift in art that occurred in the postwar years, a change
that would alter the course of art history. Now firmly established as
part of the 20th century art historical canon, many of de Kooning’s Woman paintings form the cornerstones of major international museum collections and as such, Woman as Landscape is one of the only paintings from this important period of the artist’s career to remain in private hands.
Jackson Pollock’s Composition with Red Strokes was
executed in 1950 during the peak of his extraordinary creative output
and is a central work to the artist’s oeuvre, demonstrating his new
technique (estimate in the region of $50 million). It was these
startling, original and accomplished paintings that, in Willem de
Kooning's phrase, finally 'broke the ice' for American painting,
completely revolutionizing it and in the process reshaping the entire
history of 20th century art. The diverse, virtuosic and carefully
controlled markmaking in Composition with Red Strokes represents
the variety, subtlety and mystery that Pollock had achieved in his new
language of paint. Displaying a fascinatingly dense, intricate and
animated abstract surface, Composition with Red Strokes is one
of the richest, most engaging and successfully resolved of all these
famous works. Other works made by Pollock in this key period are held at
the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the
National Gallery of Art.
Among the other Post-War highlights in the Collection are Joan Mitchell’s 12 Hawks at 3 O’clock, created at a pivotal time when the artist’s abstraction reached new levels (estimate: $14-16 million),
Gray Rectanglesby Jasper Johns, the first work by the artist to be acquired by the legendary collectors Victor and Sally Ganz (estimate: $20-30 million), and
Franz Kline’s Painting (estimate: $5-7 million).
Ebsworth had a lasting friendship with Georgia O’Keeffe –
she acted as a witness to his second marriage which took place at her
Abiquiú home in New Mexico – who is represented in the Collection with
Horn and Feather, 1937 (estimate: $700,000-1,000,000)
and Beauford Delaney, 1943 (estimate: $200,000-300,000).
Additional works in the Collection by members of the Stieglitz Circle are
Stuart Davis’s Still Life in the Street (estimate: $500,000-700,000)
and Marsden Hartley’s Calm After Storm off Hurricane Island (estimate: $1,500,000-2,500,000).
Among the finest examples ever to appear on the market from Precisionist artist Charles Sheeler is Catwalk, 1947, which once belonged to Nelson Rockefeller (estimate: $1,200,000-1,800,000).
Representing the Ashcan School is
William Glackens’ Café Lafayette (Portrait of Kay Laurel), which
was Ebsworth’s first acquisition of American Art in 1972 (estimate:
$250,000-350,000). Among several examples by the American artists in
Gertrude Stein’s circle offered in the sale are Elie Nadelman’sDancing Figure (estimate:
$600,000-800,000).
The Collection also includes extremely rare examples
from important artists who infrequently appear on the market and are
primarily held in museums, such as Patrick Henry Bruce’s Peinture/Nature Morte (estimate: $2,000,000-3,000,000 million), which was displayed alongside Hopper’s Chop Suey in the library. In total, the Collection includes a full range of price levels, with estimates starting at $100,000.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1934, Barney A. Ebsworth was an
entrepreneur and his success was self-made. He founded Clipper Cruise
Line, among other cruise lines, the Intrav luxury travel business and
was an angel investor in the stuffed-animal phenomenon Build-A-Bear
Workshop. Ebsworth’s passion for art originated during his station with
the US Army in France in 1956, when he made weekly trips to the Louvre.
Mr. Ebsworth was a renowned collector who gave generously over the
years to the Seattle Art Museum as well as to many other museums and
charitable institutions, including gifts of major early American works.
He also devoted substantial time and financial resources in support of
these institutions, including serving on the Board of the Seattle Art
Museum. Ebsworth was named as one of the ‘World’s 200 Greatest
Collectors’ and ‘America’s Top 100 Collectors’, and served as a board
member or trustee for the Seattle Art Museum, the Honolulu Museum of
Art, the St. Louis Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, Washington,
the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Frank Lloyd Wright House in
Ebsworth Park, St. Louis, and the Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis.
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) has announced Gauguin: A Spiritual Journey,
debuting at the de Young museum on November 17. The first exhibition at
FAMSF dedicated to the work of Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) will explore
two themes central to his career: the relationships that shaped his life
and work, and his quest to understand spirituality, both his own and
that of other cultures he encountered.
Through an exceptional
partnership with the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, more than
sixty Gauguin works will be on view—ranging from oil paintings and works
on paper to wood carvings and ceramics—alongside art of the Pacific
Islands from the FAMSF collection. Combined, these works encompass
distinctive phases of Gauguin’s career to show the development of his
ideas, the scope of his oeuvre, and the inspiration he found in New
Zealand, the Marquesas Islands, and Tahiti.
"The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco have the largest repository
of works on paper in the western United States, including numerous works
by Gauguin—among them, The Woman from Arles, one of his most important
drawings,” says Melissa Buron, Director of the Art Division at FAMSF.
“Putting these works on view with Gauguin’s stunning oil paintings
provides an unprecedented opportunity for our collection to shine and
take its place in the larger historical narrative.”
Gauguin: A Spiritual Journey will feature works showing the
deep influence that other artists, places, and relationships had on the
arc of his career. Embarking on a profession in painting with no formal
training, Gauguin was mentored by Impressionists including Camille
Pissarro and Edgar Degas. (In fact, as an avid collector himself,
Gauguin originally owned two of the Pissarro paintings on view in the
exhibition.) Later collaborations with Vincent van Gogh and Émile
Bernard show experiments with Symbolism as Gauguin developed his own
distinctive style of painting, using flat fields of bold color and dark
outlines that in turn influenced artists including Pablo Picasso and
Henri Matisse.
The exhibition will take visitors on a journey through the
progression and scope of Gauguin’s work, from an early drawing of his
wife, Mette Gad (ca. 1873), to better-known paintings inspired by his
travels to Tahiti, such as
Tahitian Woman with a Flower (Vahine no te tiare),
from 1891. Although Gauguin is best known as a painter and printmaker,
the exhibition will also feature fifteen experimental ceramics and
intricate wood carvings interspersed with period photography and
excerpts from his own letters and writings.
Gauguin was greatly influenced by Pacific art and culture, from his
time spent in the region en route to Tahiti in 1895.
Corresponding to
this period of Gauguin’s travel and work in the Pacific, carvings and
images from New Zealand, the Marquesas Islands, and Tahiti will be on
view from FAMSF’s own extensive holdings in Oceanic arts.
Works such as
the striking Māori gable figure of Tüwhakairiora, purchased by founder
M. H. de Young from the 1894 California Midwinter International
Exposition in Golden Gate Park, will add to visitors’ understanding of
the Pacific histories, beliefs, and art that inspired Gauguin and
captured his imagination. (Tüwhakairiora was an ancestor who avenged the
death of his grandfather and became a leader of all the peoples of New
Zealand’s northeast coast of North Island in the seventeenth century.)
“It is exciting to bring so many Gauguin works to San Francisco,”
says exhibition curator Christina Hellmich, curator in charge of the
Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at the Fine Arts Museums of
San Francisco. “I am pleased that we can highlight some lesser-known
aspects of his life, including his wife’s critical role in his career,
and offer contemporary perspectives through a new video installation.
The striking works of Māori, Marquesan, and Tahitian art from our own
collection will allow visitors to learn about Gauguin’s fervent interest
in the art and spirituality of Oceania.”
Among many of Gauguin’s paintings are subjects believed to depict
Indigenous Māhu, or Tahitian “third gender” individuals. In Sāmoa, the
equivalent is known as a Fa’afafine, an indigenous queer minority
considered to be gifted in the spirit of more than one gender.
Sāmoa-based interdisciplinary artist Yuki Kihara has been commissioned
to create a new video work that will debut with this exhibition. Filmed
in Upolu Island Sāmoa, her piece, entitled First Impressions: Paul Gauguin, shows a group of Fa’afafine friends discussing works that Gauguin created during his time in the Pacific.
"The Glyptotek contains one of the world’s finest collections of
Gauguin’s works,” adds Christine Buhl Andersen, Director of the Ny
Carlsberg Glyptotek. “For us it is of crucial significance that the
collection is put into new contexts and thus remains vital and relevant.
This is the case here where two museums have combined their potential
and worked together curatorially, thus creating an original exhibition.
We at the Glyptotek have enjoyed an excellent collaboration with the de
Young museum and we look forward to experiencing the public’s reception
of the exhibition when it opens in San Francisco.”
Gauguin: A Spiritual Journey is organized by Christina
Hellmich, curator in charge of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the
Americas at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and co-organized by
Line Clausen Pedersen, curator at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek,
Copenhagen.
The exhibition will be on view at the de Young museum from November
17, 2018, through April 7, 2019, and then travel to the Ny Carlsberg
Glyptotek.
This dazzling book showcases dozens of Paul Gauguin's most celebrated
works and presents a new consideration of the artist's relationships.
This
vibrant examination of Paul Gauguin's life and work features more than
fifty pieces from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek collection in Copenhagen,
including paintings, wood carvings, and ceramics along with Oceanic art
and Gauguin's works on paper from the Fine Arts Museums of San
Francisco's permanent collections. Each piece is reproduced in exquisite
detail, offering a superb opportunity to enjoy Gauguin's groundbreaking
use of color, line, and form. Essays examine Gauguin's relationships
and reveal the struggles, indulgences, awakenings, and betrayals of his
personal and professional life. Other essays provide new insights into
Gauguin's travels to the far reaches of the French colonial empire in
the Pacific and explore his cultural identity, sexuality, and
spirituality. Beautifully designed to complement Gauguin's extraordinary
oeuvre, this book offers a refreshing take on an artist whose life and
work continue to fascinate to the present day.
Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY
February 9-May 12, 2019
James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, PA
June 1-September 8, 2019
Oscar Florianus Bluemner (American, born in Germany,
1867-1938). Moon Radiance, 1927. Watercolor with gum coating on hot
pressed off-white wove paper laid down by the artist to thick wood
panel. Collection of Karen and Kevin Kennedy.
The moon—its face, color, and enduring myth—threads through
the tapestry of American landscape painting, holding timeless allure for
artists everywhere. This softly glowing orb has inspired countless
works of art since the first humans looked up at the skies and saw its
cratered face. The experience of contemplating the moon is universal to
the human experience. It unites us in philosophical questions about our
own place in the world.
Arthur Dove (American, 1880-1946). Moon, 1935. Oil on
canvas. Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Gift of Barney A. Ebsworth, 2000.39.1.
George Inness (American, 1825-1894). Winter Moonlight
(Christmas Eve), 1866. Oil on canvas. Collection of the Montclair Art
Museum. Museum purchase; Lang Acquisition Fund, 1948.29.
Next winter, the Hudson River Museum, in Yonkers, New York, presents a
stunning exhibition devoted to the allure of the moon for American
painters, whose art has reflected the eternal fascination with our
closest celestial body. It is the first major museum examination of the
moon as it relates to the story of the American nocturne, as it
developed from the early 1820s through the late 1960s.
Frederic Edwin Church, Moonrise (The Rising Moon), January – March, 1865. Oil on canvas, 10 x 17 inches.
The exhibition features more than 50 works of art, highlighting key
painters who depicted the moon, from the early 19th-century masterpieces
of Thomas Cole, the father of the Hudson River School,
who embraced a kind of longing Romanticism that the astronomical body
symbolized, to late works by famed illustrator Norman Rockwell,
represented by his depictions of a long-held romantic yearning finally
fulfilled–America’s triumphant lunar landing in 1969. All of the works
in the exhibition underscore how the Romantic idea of the moon held an
inexorable pull for artists, and was central to its depiction of
landscape, a subject of ongoing engagement at the Museum.
The Color of the Moon will premiere at the Hudson River Museum on February 8, 2019 and run through May 12,
followed by a summer 2019 showing at the James A. Michener Art Museum
in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, which has partnered with the Hudson River
Museum to organize the exhibition.
The Color of the Moon reveals the long and enduring relationship between art and lunar science.The exhibition coincides with the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission,
when American astronauts traveled across the skies to step onto the
pitted surface of the moon in July 1969. Even before that historic
moment, much scientific and aesthetic debate revolved around the
question: What color is the moon? Artists continued their own
explorations despite public disappointment when astronauts reported the
rocks and dust were grayish brown. The Hudson River Museum, which has
the only public planetarium in Westchester County and is dedicated to
exploring the relationship between the arts and science, is poised as an
ideal venue to explore this subject.
Several works from the Museum’s collection will be featured in The Color of the Moon, including
The Burning Ship by Albert Bierstadt.
Other major artists represented through loans include Jasper Francis Cropsey, Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, Susie M. Barstow, George Inness, Edward Bannister, Ralph Blakelock, Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam, Arthur Dove, Edward Steichen, Oscar Bluemner, Marguerite Zorach, Joseph Cornell, and Jamie Wyeth.
Major lenders include the National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, The New-York Historical Society, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, Olana State Historic Site, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Delaware Art Museum, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Francis Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, along with works from private collections.
Publication:
The Hudson River Museum will co-publish a fully-illustrated, 200-page catalog with Fordham University Pressand the Michener Art Museum. Authors include co-curators Laura Vookles (Chair, Curatorial Department, Hudson River Museum) and Bartholomew F. Bland (Executive Director, Lehman College Art Gallery, The City University of New York), as well as Theodore W. Barrow (Assistant Curator, Hudson River Museum), Stella Paul (author of Chromaphilia: The Story of Color in Art), and Melissa Martens Yaverbaum (Executive
Director, Council of American Jewish Museums).
Themes explored in the
essays will include our eternal fascination with the appearance of the
moon and the myths it inspired; the moonlit landscapes of the Hudson
River School; the moody moon of the Gilded Age; the allure of our lunar
neighbor for early Modernists; and how the race for the moon transformed
its appearance in popular culture.
This
fall, the story of our changing relationship with the natural world
will be comprehensively told through a groundbreaking exhibition
encompassing three centuries of American art. Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment
presents more than 120 paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings,
photographs, videos and works of decorative art, from the colonial
period to the present, exploring for the first time how American artists
of different traditions and backgrounds have both reflected and shaped
environmental understanding while contributing to the development of a
modern ecological consciousness.
This sweeping exhibition engages a wide range of genres and
historical contexts – from colonial furniture to the art of Jeffersonian
natural science, from Hudson River landscape painting to Native
American basketry, from Dust Bowl regionalism to modernist abstraction
and postwar environmental activism – highlighting the evolving
ecological implications of subjects and contexts of creation as well as
artistic materials and techniques. The result is a major
reinterpretation of American art that examines both iconic masterpieces
and rarely seen objects through a lens uniting art historical
interpretation with environmental history, scientific analysis and the
dynamic field of ecocriticism.
“Nature’s Nation advances
a new approach to understanding and interpreting American art of the
past three centuries, opening up rich avenues of engagement with both
celebrated and less familiar works of art,” said James Steward, Nancy A.
Nasher–David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, director. “At a time when
the question of our relationship with the natural world is so much on
our minds, Nature’s Nation positions the museum as a crucial
site for close looking, conversation and exchange on questions that
matter both to our identities as Americans and to our future.”
The exhibition is the culmination of years of innovative research
by co-curators Karl Kusserow, the John Wilmerding Curator of American
Art at the Princeton University Art Museum, and Alan C. Braddock, the
Ralph H. Wark Associate Professor of Art History and American Studies at
William & Mary. To help rethink American art history in
environmental terms, they have selected works by more than 100 artists,
including John James Audubon, George Bellows, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic
Edwin Church, Thomas Cole, Thomas Eakins, Theaster Gates, Winslow
Homer, Louisa Keyser, Dorothea Lange, Ana Mendieta, Thomas Moran, Isamu
Noguchi, Georgia O’Keeffe, Maya Lin, Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles
Willson Peale, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Alexis Rockman,
Robert Smithson, Carleton Watkins and Andrew Wyeth.
Nature’s Nation begins with an introductory gallery, where iconic paintings by
Albert Bierstadt (Bridal Veil Falls, Yosemite, ca. 1871-73)
and Thomas Moran (Lower Falls, Yellowstone Park, 1893) are displayed alongside works by Valerie Hegarty (Fallen Bierstadt, 2007) and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Browning of America,
2000) that revise and complicate earlier perceptions of the pristine
American environment. The fifteen diverse works in the introduction set
the stage for the following sections, which together reveal our evolving
sense of what nature means and how we as humans relate to it.
The first, Colonization and Empire, focuses on images of the young
Republic’s ideas about natural order, as seen in
Charles Willson
Peale’s renowned The Artist in His Museum (1822), before exploring picturesque and sublime representations of the land in paintings such as
Thomas Cole’s Home in the Woods
(1847), and Americans’ plans for nature’s transformation, as in
Frederick Law Olmsted’s enormous Central Park “Greensward Plan” (1858).
A second section, Industrialization and Conservation, explores
work that addresses the tensions between progress and preservation,
including complex representations of consumption and its effects by
Winslow Homer (Prisoners from the Front, 1866),
Thomas Anshutz (The Ironworker’s Noontime, 1880) and a Standing Rock Sioux artist (a stretched buffalo robe of 1882).
Finally, Ecology and Environmentalism considers art of the 20th
and 21st centuries that reimagines ecology on a global scale through
expansive techniques and media. Among the works featured are
Georgia
O’Keeffe’s iconic The Lawrence Tree (1929) and Robert Rauschenberg’s lithographic collage announcing the first Earth Day (1970).
“The Museum is grateful to the many institutions and funders who
enthusiastically supported this innovative new vision of North American
history and culture,” Steward said. Lenders include 70 eminent national
collections, both private and public, as well as works drawn from
Princeton’s extensive holdings.
Reframing more than 300 years of diverse artistic practice in North America, from the colonial period to the present, Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment examines
for the first time how American artists have both reflected and shaped
environmental understanding while contributing to the emergence of a
modern ecological consciousness.
Sanford
Robinson Gifford, Hunter Mountain, Twilight, 1866. Terra Foundation for
American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1999.57
The exhibition traces evolving ideas about the environment – and our
place within it – from colonial beliefs about natural theology and
biblical dominion through the 19th-century notion of manifest destiny to
the emergence of modern ecological ethics. This pioneering exhibition
will gather approximately 125 works of art by a broad range of artists –
including iconic masterpieces as well as rare and seldom exhibited
works – and interpret them through an interdisciplinary lens that unites
art and environmental history with scientific analysis, using
ecocriticism as a tool to see the history of American art in a new
light. Organized by the Princeton University Art Museum, the exhibition is
cocurated by Karl Kusserow, John Wilmerding curator of American art at
the Princeton University Art Museum; and Alan C. Braddock, Ralph H. Wark
associate professor of art history and American studies at the College
of William and Mary. Nature’s Nation will consist of paintings, sculptures,
prints, drawings, photographs, videos and works of decorative art
gathered from more than 70 eminent collections across the United States
as well as from Princeton’s own extensive holdings. The exhibition will
be arranged in three chronological eras marked by shifting human
conceptions of the natural world and increasing artistic awareness of
environmental change. Among the more than 100 artists featured in the exhibition will be
John James Audubon, George Bellows, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin
Church, Thomas Cole, Thomas Eakins, Theaster Gates, Winslow Homer,
Louisa Keyser, Dorothea Lange, Ana Mendieta, Thomas Moran, Isamu
Noguchi, Georgia O’Keeffe, Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles Willson Peale,
Sarah Miriam Peale, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Alexis
Rockman, Robert Smithson and Carleton Watkins. A major 448-page catalogue, published by the Princeton University Art
Museum and distributed by Yale University Press, accompanies the
exhibition. In addition to a series of expansive narrative essays by the
curators, the publication features contributions by 13 distinguished
scholars and artists in a variety of fields, including art historians
Rachael DeLue and Robin Kelsey, artists Mark Dion and Jaune Quick-to-See
Smith, and environmental theorists Timothy Morton and Rob Nixon.
ReTooled: Highlights from the Hechinger Collection,
an engaging and thought-provoking look at the unexpected subject of
tools, will be on view at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, CT, from
September 22 through December 30, 2018. Featuring more than 40 richly
imaginative, quirky, and thought-provoking paintings,
sculptures, photographs, and sketches, ReTooled celebrates the
prevalence of tools in our lives with art that magically transforms
utilitarian objects into fanciful works that speak of beauty, insight,
and wit.
The museum’s signature fall exhibition, ReTooled profiles 28
visionary artists from the Hechinger Collection and includes major
artists such as Arman, Richard Estes, Howard Finster, Red Grooms, Jacob
Lawrence, Fernand Léger and H.C. Westermann; photographers Berenice
Abbott and Walker Evans; as well as pop artists Jim Dine, Claes
Oldenburg, and James Rosenquist.
"Carpenters" lithograph by Jacob Lawrence in the Bruce Museum exhibition"ReTooled: Highlights from the Hechinger Collection." photo: Joel Breger
Some of these artists portray tools
with reverence to emphasize their purity of design, while
others disfigure and transform implements to highlight their
obsolescence in today’s world of glass, steel, and technology.
These works were brought together in the 1980s by John Hechinger,
owner of a hardware store chain in the Mid-Atlantic region. Hechinger is
often credited as one of the major figures in the transformation of the
neighborhood hardware store to the “do-it-yourself” home improvement
business. His intent to beautify a new company headquarters led to the
acquisition of a tool-inspired collection of diverse 20th-century art.
“I felt that if I could show my associates how so many artists had
celebrated the handsaw or the hammer or the paint brush, they would be
aware of the intrinsic beauty of the simple objects that they handled by
the tens of thousands,” said Hechinger. “They were not only the focus
of their workdays, but our company’s very lifeblood.”
Hechinger later donated his collection to International Arts &
Artists, a non-profit arts service organization based in Washington, DC,
dedicated to increasing cross-cultural understanding and exposure to
the arts internationally through exhibitions, programs and services to
artists, art institutions and the public.
Curated by Jared Packard-Winkler, ReTooled presents the works in four
sections: Objects of Beauty, Material Illusions, Instruments of Satire,
and Tools: An Extension of Self.
In Objects of Beauty, artists celebrate the simplicity and purity of
distilled design, emphasizing the beauty of soft curves, harsh cut
lines, and the dull shine of hardy iron. Walker Evans’ photograph of
a mundane tool in Wrench (1965) encourages viewers to find beauty in the
wrench’s slim lines and economy of form, while Jim Dine’s series of
nine works, Toolbox (1966), places screen print images of tools in
ascetic, yet energetic compositions. These artists work to reveal the
rare vulnerable beauty ofeveryday tools taken out of their work environments.
Material Illusions presents tools through a distorted lens -- artists
reimage tools and render them useless in unusual contexts to question
their functionality. In Richard Adams’ sculpture Lathe (1979), he
subverts the viewer’s initial view of a lathe by constructing the
sculpture out of maple wood.
F.L. Wall’s Summer Tool (1983) presents an
oak-fashioned lawn mower cutting each blade of grass at a uniform
height, perhaps offering a critical response to our industrial society’s
propensity to
homogenization. This collection highlights the
distance growing between modern society and the simple tools that used
to be synonymous with American progress, now replaced by the computer
and other technological tools.
In Instruments of Satire, artists play with tools by injecting sharp
humor and wit into their works.
In James Rosenquist’s Trash Can in the
Grass-Calix Krater (1978), he presents a simple trash can adorned with
ancient Greek imagery to elevate it to a vessel from antiquity.
Claes Oldenburg, Three Way Plug, 1965, offset lithograph with airbrush. 39 x 31½ x 1 inches.
photo: Joel Breger
Claes
Oldenburg drastically heroizes an everyday object in Three-way Plug
(1965) by rendering the plug with a larger-than-life status that verges
on the comical. These representations of tools remind viewers that the
essence of art is the joy of creation.
In Tools: An Extension of Self, artists illustrate how tools have
shaped the American consciousness by acting as our surrogate limbs and
executing the actions that our vulnerable bodies cannot. Thus,
the American core value of self-improvement is intertwined with these
tools that create our capacity to create change and realize far-fetched
visions. Howard Finster’s Saw/Mountains of People Use Tools (1990)
pushes forth the idea that tools advanced human civilization by
scrawling “tools came first and America was built second” on a Stanley
Thrift saw.
In The Slob (1965), H.C. Westermann imbues a hammer with the
personality of its wielder, emphasizing the idea of the tool as an
extension of human action.
ReTooled: Highlights from the Hechinger Collection was organized by
International Arts and Artists, Washington, DC. Gift of John and June
Hechinger.
Vincent van Gogh, Self-portrait, April-June 1887.
Detail. Coll. Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo
For the first time in 50 years
It is more than 50 years since the Danish public has been able to
experience a large exhibition devoted exclusively to van Gogh’s
paintings and drawings. In a unique collaboration with the
Kröller-Müller Museum, The Netherlands, ARKEN now open its doors for a
wide-ranging exhibition of van Gogh’s works with a focus on the
relations among art, humanity, nature and religion.
’The guy with the ear”
Vincent van Gogh (1853-90) is one of the most famous artists to have
walked this earth. Notorious for having cut his ear off. Loved for his
moving paintings and letters, which give us intimate insights into his
life and thoughts. For Van Gogh life and art were a hard struggle. Yet
he was able to create an original artistic idiom that demonstrates his
profound belief in the cosmic unity of man and nature. ARKEN’s
exhibition shows with 28 paintings and 11 drawings how his depictions of
hard-working farm labourers and captivating landscapes in Arles were
meant to express the divine in nature and mankind at a time of new
departures in society when traditional faith was coming under pressure
from modern philosophy and science.
Vincent van Gogh, Still-life with a Plate of
Onions, 1890. Coll. Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo
What am I in
the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable
person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a
little lower than the lowest. Very well…, then through my work I’d like
to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody.
Vincent van Gogh in a letter to Theo van Gogh, July 1882
THE INNER LIFE OF NATURE
Van Gogh’s landscapes are not charming postcards frozen in time.
Everything lives and moves. The earth swells, the trees breathe and the
heavenly bodies follow their courses.
Vincent van Gogh, The Ravine, 1889. Courtesy Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo.
From childhood Van Gogh was preoccupied with the close study of nature.
All his life he wandered on foot through the landscapes he lived in, and
as an artist he preferred to paint under the open sky. Over time Van
Gogh developed a quite personal Christian faith. He did not attend
church. He found the divine outside the church in everything living,
from a dandelion in seed to the intense sea of beams of the sinking sun.
I PLOUGH MY CANVASES
In a letter from 1889 Van Gogh wrote: “I plough on my canvases as the
peasants do in their fields.” When Van Gogh ploughed the canvas with his
brush, he immersed himself in the loam, the olive groves and the quiet
corners in the rambling garden of the psychiatric hospital in
Saint-Rémy.
Detail of Vincent van Gogh, The Garden of the Asylum at Saint Rémy, 1889. Courtesy of the Kröller-Müller.
He asked himself how he could make himself useful – like the
diligent peasant – as an artist in the world. The answer for him was to
sow the divine message of beauty in the world through his painting. In
The Sower Van Gogh gathers his ideas about the artist as someone who
shows us the spiritual depths of nature by creating beautiful depictions
of it. The sower is the protagonist of the Biblical parable about
spreading the word of God. At the same time he is a quite ordinary
peasant who works to the rhythm of nature.
Vincent van Gogh, The Sower, 1888. Coll. Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo
The exhibition has been organised in association with the Kröller-Müller Museum, The Netherlands
Detail of Vincent van Gogh, Pine Trees at Sunset, 1889. Courtesy of the Kröller-Müller Museum.
