Wednesday, August 17, 2022

A Time of Toil and Triumph: Selections from the Shogren-Meyer Collection of American Art




Grohmann Museum, Milwaukee

Sept. 9, 2022—Feb. 26, 2023 

As a part of its 15th anniversary celebration, the Grohmann Museum is organizing a blockbuster exhibition from one of the premier collections of American industrial art—The Shogren-Meyer Collection. A collection focused primarily on the art of the 1930s and 40s, it also includes many fine examples from the surrounding decades, with many created during the depression era—a time of both toil and triumph.


A grand opening event will be held for A Time of Toil and Triumph on Friday, Sept. 9 from 5 to 8 p.m. The free event will include a Gallery Talk with the collectors, Dan Shogren and Susan Meyer at 6:30 p.m.


Now making their home in the Twin Cities, Shogren and Meyer met while in college at the University of Minnesota Duluth, where both majored in history. It was at that time they took a keen interest in the era on which the collection is based, the “interwar period,” a time of American reinvention—economically, socially, and artistically.


They have since built one of the finest collections of American Art concentrated on this time. Selected from the hundreds of works in their collection, A Time of Toil and Triumph will include dozens of paintings and photographs by Aaron Bohrod, Margaret Bourke-White, John Steuart Curry, Walker Evans, Lewis Hine, Edmund Lewandowski, Dorothea Lange, Thornton Oakley, and Isaac Soyer, among many others.




John Stockton De Martelly (1903-1979), Whiskey Going into Barrels to Age (Marking the Casks), 1946, Oil on canvas, 36 x 33 in.



Robert Gilbert (1907–1988) Industrial Composition, 1932, Oil on canvas, 47 x 34 in.



Joe Jones (1909–1963), Levee, 1933, Oil on canvas, 30 x 41 in.



Edmund Lewandowski (1914-1998), The Waterfront (Buoy Tenders), 1935, Oil on canvas, 32 x 47 in.



Thornton Oakley (1881-1953), The Wonderland of Oil, ca.1942, Pastel and gouache on paper, 30 x 40 in.