JAMIE WYETH: UNSETTLED

 

BRANDYWINE MUSEUM OF ART 

 March 17–June 9, 2024

Jamie Wyeth (b. 1946), Bean Boots, 1985, oil on panel, 37 x 50 in. Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine. Gift of the Cawley Family, 2001.29.1

 Opening at the Brandywine Museum of Art this spring, Jamie Wyeth: Unsettled will trace a persistent vein of intriguing, often disconcerting imagery over the career of renowned artist Jamie Wyeth (b. 1946). This major exhibition—organized by the Brandywine and five years in the making—will feature more than 50 works drawn from museum and private collections across the country that focus on the artist’s arresting, visceral imagery, revealing fascinating insight into Wyeth and the art of visual storytelling. Unsettled will be on view at Brandywine from March 17–June 9, 2024, before traveling to four additional art museums around the United States.

"Jamie Wyeth is a renowned American painter who has created his own legacy and redefined what it means to be a Wyeth. This exhibition takes a fresh look at the artist’s oeuvre and with remarkable nuance plumbs a rich vein of the uncanny throughout Wyeth's six-decade career," said Thomas Padon, the James H. Duff Director of the Brandywine Museum of Art. "As the title suggests, Unsettled focuses on a single through line in Wyeth's work—one in which ominous stillness, postapocalyptic skies, frightening shifts in scale, and strange vantage points seem to highlight the vulnerability of the human condition. With his startling compositions and a masterful use of media, color and texture, Wyeth creates an immersive, synesthetic experience that both engages and upsets visual and emotional equilibrium."

A celebrated figure in contemporary art and fiercely independent in the face of prevailing art world trends, Jamie Wyeth stands apart in a shadowy and strange world of his own creation. While frequently countered and even hidden by the artist’s fuller body of work—particularly his well-known coastal views, farmscapes, and portraits—a consistent thread of darker, more troubling imagery has been a constant in the artist’s work over the past 60 years. His work has evolved from the ultra-realistic visions and virtuoso brushwork of his youth into a mature expressionism in which intense color and dramatic paint handling electrify his canvases. As this exhibition will reveal, in each of these stages of his career Wyeth is at home with uneasy subjects and a master of the unsettled mood. 

“Across the decades, Wyeth has honed his attention onto unnerving phenomena, zeroed in on uncanny experiences, and delved into a world of unsettling imagery,” said Amanda C. Burdan, Ph.D. Senior Curator at Brandywine and curator of the exhibition. “With consummate skill, marshaling a wide range of disconcerting elements—subjects, compositional approaches and techniques—within his works, Wyeth has developed skillful, cinematic evocations that can induce anxiety in the viewer.”

Unsettled begins with a presentation of eccentric portraits that illustrate Wyeth’s most powerful means of evoking disquieting moods, like the subjects in Bean Boots (1985) and Dead Cat Museum (1999), or the figures left partially hidden, such as in Record Player (1964) and Other Voices, Study #1 (1995). The exhibition continues by immersing viewers into natural and supernatural worlds, from works inspired by the artist’s time spent in Maine—which frequently acknowledge the power of the sea and its fearsome ability to render humans helpless—to forest-based works from Pennsylvania that delve into the supernatural side of nature. The animal kingdom also offers opportunities for Wyeth to stretch his dark imagination, with portraits of frenzied birds, mesmerizing sheep, and decapitated deer in vivid paintings. The exhibition concludes with an exploration of haunted spaces, from eerie exteriors like Pom Pom’s Cadillac (ca. 1965) to works such as Gull and Windsor (1993) that breach thresholds to explore uncertain interiors.

Jamie Wyeth: Unsettled is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue co-published by Rizzoli Electa and Brandywine. This major publication features a lead essay by Burdan, as well as contributions from other authors who explore the creation of similarly unsettling moods in different media, including essays by John Rusk on filmmaking, Rena Butler on choreography, Michael Kiley on sound artistry, and Jennifer Margaret Barker on classical composition. 

Following its presentation in Chadds Ford, PA at the Brandywine, the exhibition will travel to the Farnsworth Art Museum (Rockland, ME), Greenville County Museum of Art (Greenville, SC), Dayton Art Institute (Dayton, OH), and the Frye Art Museum (Seattle, WA).

Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

March 22, 2024–April 20, 2025

To inaugurate its 50th-anniversary season, the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden presents “Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960,” a major survey of artwork made during a transformative period characterized by new currents in science and philosophy and ever-increasing mechanization. 

“Revolutions” captures shifting cultural landscapes through the largely chronological presentation of 270 artworks by 126 artists in the Museum’s permanent collection—including Francis Bacon, Jean Dubuffet, Lee Krasner, Wifredo Lam, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe and Jackson Pollock—made during these turbulent and energetic years. The exhibition includes contemporary work by 19 artists, including Torkwase Dyson, Rashid Johnson, Annette Lemieux, Dyani White Hawk and Flora Yukhnovich, whose practices demonstrate how many revolutionary ideas and approaches that arose during these 100 years remain critical. Organized by Hirshhorn Associate Curator Marina Isgro and Assistant Curator Betsy Johnson, “Revolutions” will fill the Museum’s second-floor outer-circle galleries from March 22, 2024, to April 20, 2025.

“The Hirshhorn opened in 1974 as a modern art museum,” said Hirshhorn Director Melissa Chiu. “It has since become a modern and contemporary museum, largely because of Joseph H. Hirshhorn’s vision that his foundational gift should meet the needs of a national museum dedicated to the art of our time. ‘Revolutions’ reminds us that we are connected to an art-historical continuum through engagement with artists, artwork and ideas—in person and virtually.”

“Revolutions” spotlights the rush of art-historical movements and genres that characterized the arc of Modernism and the ascendancy of abstraction, notably through the work of artists interested in engaging the mind, not just the eye. This breadth was evident in Joseph Hirshhorn’s founding gifts to the Museum. An industrialist, collector and philanthropist, Hirshhorn donated nearly 6,000 works—including a significant number of sculptures—in anticipation of the Museum’s opening on October 4, 1974, and 6,400 more upon his death in 1981. Together these gifts constitute one of the most important collections of postwar American and European art in the world. Today, the Hirshhorn collection comprises more than 13,130 artworks.

“Revolutions” takes a primarily chronological approach to historical movements, pausing occasionally to introduce contemporary works that serve as throughlines. The exhibition opens, for example, with “Modern Beginnings,” an examination of large-scale portraiture (a hallmark of social standing) that twins “Mrs. Kate A. Moore” (1884) by John Singer Sargent, part of Hirshhorn’s initial gift, with Amoako Boafo’s “Cobalt Blue Dress” (2020), a recent acquisition. In the same section, Henri Matisse’s series “Heads of Jeannette,” five sculptures made between 1910 and 1913, traces a progression from representation to abstraction, indicating how rapidly 20th-century artists adopted abstract approaches.

In subsequent galleries, sections such as “Abstraction and Construction” and “Vital Forms” are devoted to work by Futurists, including four sculptures by Giacomo Balla, as well as to Cubist works by artists including Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger and Yun Gee. Artistic responses to the ferocity of World War I’s nationalism and modern warfare are highlighted by 

Marsden Hartley’s “Painting No. 47, Berlin” (1914–1915)

 and Childe Hassam’s “The Union Jack, New York, April Morning” (1918). 

The installation also acknowledges how World War II tore communities apart, exiling significant artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Hans Hofmann, Lam and Piet Mondrian while accelerating the exchange of ideas between the likes of Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore.

The speed with which artistic movements developed is emphasized by the scope of work on view: George Wesley Bellows’s and Edward Hopper’s realist paintings, Aleksandra Exster’s angular Constructivist puppets, biomorphic abstractions by Jean Arp and Arshile Gorky, and lyrical landscapes by O’Keeffe and Horace Pippin, all on view, were created within 25 years of each other.

The exhibition also emphasizes the intensity of Joseph Hirshhorn’s collecting. “Revolutions” contains six significant artworks by Willem de Kooning, eight by Alberto Giacometti, nine by David Smith and nine by Jean Dubuffet—all founding gifts. Hirshhorn’s interest in Haitian painters is exemplified in pieces by Castera Bazile, Rigaud Benoit and Hector Hyppolite, whose lyrical paintings draw upon regional mysticism and resonated with the interests of the European Surrealists.

Concluding galleries consider the shift of the center of the art world from Europe to New York and the rise of Abstract Expressionism, teasing out strands of global artistic thought throughout. “Aftershocks” is dedicated to evidence of fractured artistic communities in the wake of World War II. “Gestures and Myths” considers Abstract Expressionism in artworks by, among others, Willem de Kooning, Janet Sobel and Jackson Pollock that exemplify both male and female artists’ appetite for vigorous explorations of the unconscious mind during this period. Large-scale paintings by Helen Frankenthaler, Krasner and Joan Mitchell demonstrate the era’s burgeoning confidence. Barnett Newman’s and Mark Rothko’s works, in the same galleries, evoke sensations of wonder with fields of saturated colors. The concluding section, “New Realities,” features artists who introduced found and commonplace materials into their painting, such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as others who introduced new vocabularies. Artists associated with the Japanese avant-garde, for example, such as Natsuyuki Nakanishi, moved between object-based work and performance, lending their practice an immediacy that future generations would explore to great effect.

The accompanying 398-page catalogue, “Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden: The Collection” enhanced by 50 Hi videos.

Subsequent 50th-anniversary exhibitions will explore the Hirshhorn collection from 1960 to the present.

Additional artists with work on view in “Revolutions” include:

Berenice Abbott

Anni Albers

Josef Albers

David Alekhuogie

Alexander Archipenko

Milton Avery

Francis Bacon

Daniel Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné

Castera Bazile

Thomas Hart Benton

Dawoud Bey

Charles Biederman

Oscar Bluemner

Constantin Brancusi

Joan Brown

Alexander Calder

Emily Carr

Mary Cassatt

William Merritt Chase

Joseph Cornell

Carlotta Corpron

Ralston Crawford

Abraham Cruzvillegas

Stuart Davis

Dorothy Dehner

Robert Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay

Richard Diebenkorn

Burgoyne Diller

Arthur G. Dove

Torkwase Dyson

Thomas Eakins

Max Ernst

Aleksandra Exster

Helen Frankenthaler

Adolph Gottlieb

George Grosz

Grace Hartigan

Robert Henri

Auguste Herbin

Loie Hollowell

Winslow Homer

Wassily Kandinsky

Barbara Kasten

Franz Kline

Oskar Kokoschka

Käthe Kollwitz

Wifredo Lam

Jacob Lawrence

Nadia Khodossievitch Léger

Morris Louis

Rick Lowe

Stanton Macdonald-Wright

Sally Mann

Reginald Marsh

André Masson

Joan Miró

Joan Mitchell

László Moholy-Nagy

Grandma Moses

Gabriele Münter

Natsuyuki Nakanishi

Alice Neel

Aliza Nisenbaum

Georgia O’Keeffe

Catherine Opie

Nicolas Party

Paul Pfeiffer

Ann Pibal

Nathaniel Mary Quinn

Man Ray

Larry Rivers

Auguste Rodin

Gino Severini

Ben Shahn

Leon Polk Smith

Janet Sobel

Joseph Stella

Clyfford Still

Rufino Tamayo

Pavel Tchelitchew

Alma Thomas

Joaquín Torres-García

Cy Twombly

Edouard Vuillard

Tsuruko Yamazaki

Zao Wou-Ki

 

Discovering Degas: Collecting in the Time of William Burrell

The Burrell Collection

 24 May 2024 to 30 September 2024

Discovering Degas: Collecting in the Time of William Burrell is the first-time visitors can marvel at all 23 Degas works from Burrell's original collection together in one place, including one from Berwick Museum and Art Gallery.

These exquisite works will be enhanced by the display of around 30 further exceptional paintings, works on paper and sculptures on loan from some of the UK and world’s finest national and international collections.

Burrell’s first international exhibition since reopening in 2022 offers a unique opportunity to see a stunning array of the finest works, by one of the world’s most revered artists, exhibited together. Almost 70% of the works are coming on loan from respected collections including The Courtauld, National Museums Liverpool Walker Art Gallery, The National Gallery London, The National Museum Cardiff, and the National Galleries of Scotland in the UK and Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Loans are supported by the Weston Loan Programme with Art Fund. Created by the Garfield Weston Foundation and Art Fund, the Weston Loan Programme is the first ever UK-wide funding scheme to enable smaller and local authority museums to borrow works of art and artefacts from national collections.

This spring, for the first time, visitors to the Burrell can explore Sir William Burrell’s incredible collection of works, by one of the world’s most revered artists, in its entirety. Discovering Degas promises to be a vibrant, engaging exhibition.

Pippa Stephenson-SitCurator of European Art at Glasgow Life Museums

Discovering Degas gives local communities across Glasgow an exciting way to expand their connection with an exquisite collection that is housed in their city. At the same time the strength and connoisseurship of The Burrell Collection Degas works has assisted Glasgow Life Museums in fostering relationships with some of the greatest art institutions across the world, culminating in a world-class exhibition that will further strengthen the museum’s international appeal and standing.

Degas’s work appealed to collectors like Sir William due to his skilful drawing, as well as his interest in portraying figures in movement. He was very modern in his approach working in a variety of media, adopting unexpected viewpoints and experimenting with bold colours and unusual light effects.

Professor Frances FowleSenior Trustee, Sir William Burrell Trust

It demonstrates the artist's range of output and creates a context for Burrell’s outstanding collection. Among those who developed a taste for Degas were other Glasgow shipbuilders like William McInnes, and several women, like the yachting enthusiast Elizabeth Workman and musician Rosalind Maitland.

The exhibition will explore the collecting and buying of Degas artworks by Sir William Burrell and his wife Constance, Lady Burrell, who donated one of the single greatest gifts to the city of Glasgow. As shown in the exhibition through fascinating letters and other archival material, Burrell is amongst the earliest Scottish collectors to buy works by Degas. Over a 40-year collecting period Burrell bought over 20 artworks by Degas, far more than any other UK collector, spanning the artist’s career.

 

Discovering Degas positions these acquisitions in the context of other British collectors who, in the late 19th and early 20th century, were among the first to fully appreciate the artist and purchase his enduringly appealing works. The show goes on to consider the influence of art dealers, like Alexander Reid, who championed Degas and the artist’s incredible talent for capturing subjects like the ballet, racehorses, and scenes of modern life during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

 

An accompanying publication.

Images