Malcolm Parcell (1896-1987), Portrait Of Helen Gallagher, 1943
Pennsylvania has held a prominent place in the advancement of American painting since the dynasty of the Peale family in the early decades of the 18th century. Exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Carnegie Museum of Art, along with nationally recognized studio art programs at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) played an important role in the American art scene in the opening decades of the 20th Century. This period in American art was an extremely energetic, creative and quickly changing one with artists addressing a barrage of new styles defined by abstraction and modernism.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the instruction and works of such Pennsylvania artists as George Hetzel, Thomas Anshutz, and Thomas Eakins set the stage for Robert Henri, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and Mary Cassatt, each of whom became synonymous with a different movement in American realism, focusing on the city and modern life. These artists were closely followed by artists including Aaron Harry Gorson, Joseph Hirsch, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan, who continued an interest in urban life. N.C. Wyeth, Violet Oakley, and Maxfield Parrish were artists whose works focused on images from mythology, history and literature.
The introduction to American artists of modernist European painters such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Paul Cezanne, through exhibitions in New York, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, brought Cubism, Abstraction, and Expressionism to the scene. These “isms” would stimulate new directions in American art, as explored through the works of William Baziotes, Morton Livingston Schamberg, and Charles Sheeler.
This exhibition thus brings together the work of Pennsylvania artists that, although stylistically varied, are firmly based upon the foundation of representational art. By celebrating the contributions of Pennsylvania artists and placing them and their work within the greater context of American art, Artists of the Commonwealth: Realism and its Response in Pennsylvania Painting, 1900-1950 will provide museum visitors with a rare opportunity to assess the direction of art at the opening of the 20th century.
Artists included in the exhibition:
William Baziotes (1912-)
Cecilia Beaux (1855 - 1942)
Arthur B. Carles (1882-1952)
Clarence Carter (1904-2000)
Mary Cassatt (1845-1926)
Fern Coppedge (1883-1951)
Virginia Cuthbert (1908-2001)
George Ericson, a.k.a. Eugene Iverd (1893-1936)
Daniel Garber (1880-1958)
William Glackens (1870-1938)
Aaron Harry Gorson (1872 - 1933)
Johanna K. W. Hailman (1871-1958)
Robert Henri (1865-1929)
Roy Hilton (1892 – 1963)
John Kane (1860-1934)
Albert King (1854-1945)
George Luks (1867-1933)
Norwood MacGilvary (1874 – 1949)
Violet Oakley (1874-1961)
Malcolm Parcell (1896-1987)
Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966)
Horace Pippin (1888-1946)
Hobson Pittman (1900-1972)
Joseph Plavcan (1908-1981)
Edward Redfield (1869-1965)
Samuel Rosenberg (1896-1972)
Walter Elmer Schofield (1867-1944)
Charles Sheeler (1883-1965)
Everett Shinn (1876-1953)
John Sloan (1871-1951)
Robert Spencer (1879-1931)
Walter Stuempfig (1914-1970)
Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937)
A. Bryan Wall (1861-1935)
Christian Walter (1872-1938)
Everett Warner (1877-1963)
Franklin Watkins (1894-1972)
N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945)
