Nellie Mae Rowe

 

Nellie Mae Rowe, Untitled (Dandy), 1978–1982, crayon and pencil on paper, 24 x 18 inches, gift of Harvie and Charles Abney.

High Museum of Art

Nellie Mae Rowe (American, 1900-1982), "When I Was a Little Girl," 1978, crayon, marker, colored pencil, and pencil on paper, 19 x 24, inches, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with Folk Art Acquisition Fund, 2002.73. © 2021 Estate of Nellie Mae Rowe/ARS, NY.

Melinda Blauvelt, Nellie Mae Rowe, Vinings, Georgia 1971, printed 2021, silver gelatin print, 20 x 24 inches, gift of the artist.

High Museum of Art

Nellie Mae Rowe, Real Girl, 1980, color photograph, crayon, ink, and pencil on cardboard, 14 x 11 inches, gift of Judith Alexander.

High Museum of Art

This fall, the High Museum of Art will present "Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe" (Sept. 3, 2021-Jan. 9, 2022), featuring nearly 60 works drawn from the High Museum’s folk and self-taught art collection, which has the largest public holdings of Rowe’s art. The exhibition chronicles the life and work of Rowe (1900-1982) through her imaginative works on paper and sculptures made from found and experimental materials and an artful reconstruction of her “Playhouse,” the striking art environment she created in her home and yard, which was located on a busy thoroughfare just outside of Atlanta. “Really Free” is the first major presentation of her work in more than 20 years and the first to consider her practice as a radical act of self-expression and liberation in the post-civil rights-era South. The exhibition will be accompanied by an expansive print catalogue and will be the inaugural project featured on the High’s new interactive digital platform to debut this fall. “Really Free” marks the High Museum’s first partnership with the Art Bridges Foundation, an organization dedicated to expanding access to American art, which will allow the exhibition to travel nationally into 2023.

“The High was among the first American museums to establish a department dedicated to self-taught art, and today we hold the foremost collection of work by artists without formal training from the American South, including Nellie Mae Rowe,” said Rand Suffolk, the High’s Nancy and Holcombe T. Green, Jr., director. “We are incredibly proud of this distinction and honored to celebrate Rowe’s life and work through this exhibition. Her art has been a fixture in our collection galleries for decades, and this exhibition allows a much-needed deeper look into her bold artistic production.”

Katherine Jentleson, the High’s Merrie and Dan Boone curator of folk and self-taught art, added, “The exuberant color and imaginative design that characterize so many of Rowe’s drawings—which comprise most of her surviving work—is so aesthetically pleasing that her work is often taken at face value. This show will really explore her drawing practice, tracing its emergence and relationship to the installations of her Playhouse, as well considering the artistic path she blazed for herself as a radical act undertaken at a time when Black, women and self-taught artists struggled for respect and visibility.”

Rowe began making art as a child in rural Fayetteville, Georgia, but only found the time and space to reclaim her artistic practice in the late 1960s, following the deaths of her second husband and members of the family for whom she worked. Although she did not speak much about politics or social movements, she purposefully embraced her creativity and devoted her life to making art during a time when civil rights leaders and Black feminist politicians and artists were igniting great change across the country.

Nellie Mae Rowe, Untitled (Really Free!), 1967–1976, marker and crayon on book page, 5 x 7 ½ inches, gift of Judith Alexander.

High Museum of Art

As she filled it with drawings and sculptures, Rowe’s Playhouse became an Atlanta attraction, which fostered her growing reputation and public reception. She began to exhibit her art outside of her home, beginning with “Missing Pieces: Georgia Folk Art, 1770-1976,” a bicentennial exhibition that brought attention to several Southern self-taught artists, including Rowe and Howard Finster, and traveled to venues throughout Georgia. In 1982, the year she died, Rowe’s work received a new level of acclaim, as she was honored in a solo exhibition at Spelman College and included as one of three women artists in the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s landmark exhibition “Black Folk Art in America: 1930-1980.”

The High began collecting her drawings in 1980. Between 1998 and 2003, major gifts totaling more than 130 works from trailblazing Atlanta art dealer Judith Alexander, a friend and ardent supporter of Rowe, solidified the High’s holdings as the largest public repository of Rowe’s art. Recently, the Museum announced another major gift of 17 drawings by Rowe from Atlantans Harvie and Charles Abney. Selections from this gift, as well as recent gifts and pledges of Rowe’s drawings and photographs of the artist and her Playhouse taken by Lucinda Bunnen and Melinda Blauvelt, will be presented as part of the exhibition.

“Really Free” will feature the colorful, and at times simple, sketches Rowe made on found materials in the 1960s and reveal their relationship to her most celebrated, highly complex compositions on paper of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Other sections of the exhibition will explore themes in Rowe’s work such as depictions of women, her childhood, images of her garden, and her experimentation with materials, including recycling cast-offs to make handmade dolls and chewing gum sculptures. The final galleries will focus on her career breakthrough and ruminations on death and the afterlife.

Nellie Mae Rowe, What It Is, 1978–1982, crayon, colored pencil, and pencil on paper, 21 x 21 ¼ inches, gift of Judith Alexander.

High Museum of Art

In addition to works on paper and sculptures, the exhibition will feature photographs as well as components and footage from the experimental film on Rowe’s life to be released by Opendox in 2022, “This World is Not My Own,” which includes an artful reconstruction of her Playhouse. Through these elements, visitors can experience the lively art environment she created in and outside of her home.

“Really Free” will be presented in the lower level of the High’s Wieland Pavilion.

Exhibition Publication
“Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe” is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue co-published by the High and DelMonico Books that reproduces the High’s vast Rowe collection and features a lead essay by Jentleson with contributions from documentary producer Ruchi Mital, scholar Destinee Filmore and award-winning artist Vanessa German. The High also will publish a suite of online content, including author videos, a virtual tour and additional interpretive material, as part of a new library of collection-focused digital resources that launches with “Really Free.” 

Two exhibitions can be seen together of David Hockney’s work

 

DAVID HOCKNEY In the autumn of 2021, BOZAR presents a major double exhibition of one of the most renowned and influential artists of our time. 8 OCTOBER 2021 > 23 JANUARY 2022 Featuring some of the finest works from the Tate Collection, the first exhibition David Hockney: Works from the Tate Collection, 1954-2017 takes the visitor on a journey through the long career of the 83-year-old British artist. The second exhibition, David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020 is organised in partnership with the Royal Academy of Arts. It introduces us to his most recent work. Under the motto Do remember they can’t cancel the spring, Hockney used his iPad to record the blossoming of nature during the first lockdown, in the spring of 2020. These two travelling exhibitions can only be seen together at BOZAR. It is the first time since 1992 that a major exhibition of David Hockney’s work has been organised in Belgium.

David Hockney in his Normandy studio, 24th February 2021 © David Hockney, Photo credit: Jonathan Wilkinson For over six decades, David Hockney has been renowned as an artist who is always searching for new ways of exploring and depicting the world, from pop art via landscapes to portraits from the swinging sixties in London. His iconic ‘swimming pool’ works were so successful in capturing the 1970s Californian lifestyle that they became world famous. As his main sources of inspiration are his own experiences and relationships, his powerful images appeal to people all over the world.      It is almost thirty years since Hockney was the subject of a solo exhibition at BOZAR. His work made a deep impression in 1992. It’s now time for a new generation to discover his work.      PRESS IMAGES

David Hockney, "Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy" 1970 – 1971, Acrylic on canvas, 84 x 120" © David Hockney Collection Tate, U.K. DAVID HOCKNEY: WORKS FROM THE TATE COLLECTION, 1954-2017 David Hockney: Works from the Tate Collection, 1954-2017 collects a comprehensive series of more than eighty of Hockney’s paintings, drawings and prints from the Tate Collection. This survey spans his entire career and includes a number of memorable works from the last century, such as the vast double portraits My Parents and Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy. The imposing Bigger Trees Near Water from 2007 is Hockney’s largest piece of work (over 12 metres long) and transports the visitor to a gloomy day in Yorkshire, where the artist grew up. David Hockney: Works from the Tate Collection, 1954-2017 is organised by the Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (BOZAR) in cooperation with Tate.  Exhibition curated by Helen Little. The exhibition will travel to Kunstforum Wien (spring 2022) and Kunstmuseum Luzern (summer 2022).

David Hockney, "No. 147", 5th April 2020, iPad painting © David Hockney DAVID HOCKNEY: THE ARRIVAL OF SPRING, NORMANDY, 2020 David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020, the second exhibition, consists of a series of contemporary works by the painter, now aged 83. In Normandy, he used his iPad to ‘paint’ the passage of spring during the first lockdown. The colourful paintings of the beauty of nature remind us that we must continue to ‘love life’ even during these unsettling times: “Do remember they can’t cancel the spring”. The series of 116 works is printed on high-quality paper and will be exhibited in full in the Centre for Fine Arts.    David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020 is organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London in collaboration with the Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (BOZAR). Exhibition curated by Edith Devaney, in close collaboration with David Hockney. Before Brussels, it will be on view at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (23 May > 26 September 2021).

THE PARIS OF BRASSAÏ. PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE CITY PICASSO LOVED

18 Oct. 2021 – 17 Apr. 2022 

This Autumn, Museo Picasso Málaga will be presenting The Paris of Brassaï. Photographs of the City Picasso Loved. The exhibition will display the work of one of the most famous photographers of the first half of the 20th century, whose work helped to create the universal public image of Paris, the Eternal City Brassaï’s photographs invite the observer to wander through Paris, with the Seine, Nôtre Dame, the brothels and the markets. He brilliantly captured the artistic and social scene in his many shots of the politically engaged Parisian intellectual circles of the 30s and 40s, from Sartre to Beckett. The Paris of Brassaï. Photographs of the City Picasso Loved sheds light on the professional relationship and friendship between Brassai and Picasso, who considered Brassaï the best photographer of his work. Estate Brassaï Succession has cooperated with the exhibition, and Fundación Unicaja has provided sponsorship and special collaboration.  Brassaï (1899 - 1984) Self-portrait, Boulevard Saint-Jacques, Paris, 1930-1932 Gelatin silver print, 29.6 x 22.9 cm Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris © Estate Brassaï Succession-Philippe Ribeyrolles To download the image, click on it Brassaï arrived in Paris from Hungary in 1924. He gradually discovered the powerful urban drive and social idiosyncrasies of the great metropolis. While he initially explored the city’s nightlife, over time he began to create a precise X-ray of its architecture and its people. He joined the fascinating intellectual and artistic avant-garde community of which Picasso was a member, becoming one of its finest photographic eyewitnesses. Of the many relationships he established in Paris, with writers, essayists, dramatists and visual artists, the exhibition at MPM will focus on his close and productive professional and personal relationship with Pablo Picasso. As a photographer, Brassaï constructed a visual topography of the City of Light (and shade), in the 1930s and 40s, but the exhibition also aims to show him as a prolific writer who could draw, write, and sculpt. The Paris of Brassaï. Photographs of the City Picasso Loved brings together more than 240 photographs, drawings and sculptures, mainly from the archives of the Brassaï family (Estate Brassaï Succession), along with around 30 works by Pablo Picasso, five works by other artists and over 40 publications, films, and a large amount of documentary material. Estate Brassaï Succession has offered its special collaboration on this exhibition, and Fundación Unicaja has provided special collaboration and sponsorship. Structured in four sections, the exhibition relates the work of one of the most famous European photographers of the first half of the 20th century with film, the visual arts, literature, and music. Meanwhile, MPM’s educational and cultural programme will look at the evolution of the image during the 20th century: from photography to analogical and then digital film.

Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973) Ile de la Cité – vue de Notre-Dame de Paris 26 February 1945 Oil on canvas, 80 x 120 cm Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Inv-Nr : ML 01228 © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Cologne, rba_d038672_01 © Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Málaga, 2021 To download the image, click on it Brassaï (1899 - 1984) Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, c. 1947 Gelatin silver print, 23 x 17.5 cm Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris © Estate Brassaï Succession-Philippe Ribeyrolles To download the image, click on it Brassaï (1899 - 1984) Children in front of the pond in the Luxembourg basin, Paris, 1930 Gelatin silver print, 29.6 x 22.3 cm Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris © Estate Brassaï Succession-Philippe Ribeyrolles To download the image, click on it

Vincent van Gogh’s spectacular landscape highlights Christie’s New York sale 13 May

 

Property from an Important Private European Collection VINCENT VAN GOGH (1853-1890)

Le pont de Trinquetaille

oil on canvas

25½ x 31¾ in. (65 x 81 cm.)

Painted in Arles circa 17 June 1888. $25,000,000-35,000,000

Christie’s will present Vincent van Gogh’s spectacular landscape Le pont de Trinquetaille as a highlight of the 20th Century Evening Sale at Christie’s New York on 13 May ($25,000,000-35,000,000). Painted during Van Gogh’s pivotal fifteen-month stay in Arles, situated on the Rhône River in the Provence region of Southern France, Le pont de Trinquetaille with its electric color palette and expressive brushwork is emblematic of the artist’s mature period.

Inspired by the intense Provençal light while living amidst the rural French landscape, Van Gogh’s work underwent a radical transformation as he produced one modern masterpiece after another. Painted in the summer of 1888, Le pont de Trinquetaille dates from this extraordinary period of creativity. Depicting the Rhône from Arles, it encapsulates the experimentation of this seminal period. As with the greatest of Van Gogh’s Arles landscapes, color takes on a force of its own within this radically constructed composition.

This period marks not only a central turning point in the artist’s life, but in modern art as a whole. Van Gogh’s groundbreaking use of autonomous color in his subjective vision of nature and the landscape would come to alter the course of painting throughout the following century, influencing artists from Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Pablo Picasso to Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon.

Christie’s Senior International Director, Impressionist and Modern Art Jay Vincze said, “It is a huge honor to present this spectacular work by Vincent Van Gogh to the market. Works of this scale and importance are incredibly rare and everything about it, from the vibrant, ‘absinthe’ colour of the sky and the highly structured composition to the thick and expressive brushwork of the water speaks of an artist at the very height of his creative powers.”

The vivid yellow-green shade of the river and sky lend the painting an eerie, unearthly beauty, casting the figures that populate the scene into dark, silhouetted shadow. As well as these bold planes of flattened color, the plunging perspective and clear distinction between the foreground and background in this scene were likely inspired by the Japanese prints that Van Gogh greatly admired at this time.

With an esteemed provenance, Le pont de Trinquetaille was included in a host of important and influential exhibitions soon after its creation. It  was exhibited in cities across Germany, featured in many of the shows visited by the nascent generation of German Expressionists, on whom Van Gogh’s work had a decisive impact.

Van Gogh and the Olive Groves

 Dallas Museum of Art 

October 17, 2021, to February 6, 2022

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam,

March 11 to June 12, 2022

Vincent van Gogh, Olive Grove , July1889, oil on canvas, Kröller - Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands. Photographer: Rik Klein Gotink

Vincent van Gogh, Olive Grove with Two Olive Pickers , December 1889, oil on canvas, Kröller - Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands. Photographer: Rik Klein Gotink

In 2021 and 2022 the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) and the Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam, Netherlands) host the first exhibition dedicated to Vincent van Gogh’s important olive grove series, executed during his yearlong stay at the asylum of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Co-organized by the two institutions, Van Gogh and the Olive Groves reunites for the first time the series of paintings devoted to the titular motif that the artist produced between June and December 1889. It additionally highlights new discoveries about the artist’s techniques, materials, and palette that emerged from a collaborative conservation and scientific research project that included all 15 paintings in the series. Co-curated by Nicole R. Myers, the DMA’s Barbara Thomas Lemmon Senior Curator of European Art, and Nienke Bakker, Senior Curator of Paintings at the Van Gogh Museum, the exhibition will premiere at the Dallas Museum of Art from October 17, 2021, to February 6, 2022, and will then travel to Amsterdam, where it will be presented from  March 11 to June 12, 2022.

“This exciting partnership with the Van Gogh Museum leverages the joint strengths of our two institutions—in curating and research—to present a fresh look at a much-beloved artist,” said Agustín Arteaga, the DMA’s Eugene McDermott Director. “Through world-class exhibitions such as this one, as well as the scholarship behind them, the DMA continues to uncover new insights on even the most time-honored artists to share with our communities and the art world more broadly.”

“The Van Gogh Museum is the leading authority in scholarly research into the life and work of Vincent van Gogh. This unique opportunity to study a complete series of paintings and dedicate a focused exhibition to it is immensely valuable for our knowledge on the artist’s oeuvre, and we are delighted to collaborate with the DMA on this important project,” said Emilie Gordenker, Director of the Van Gogh Museum.

With an impressive selection of the artist’s paintings and drawings from both public and private collections, Van Gogh and the Olive Groves traces Van Gogh’s evolving stylistic treatment and motivations for depicting the olive groves of Saint-Rémy over a six-month period during his stay as a self-admitted patient at the local asylum. This bold and experimental series, reunited for the first time in this exhibition, reveals Van Gogh’s passionate investigation of the expressive powers of color, line, and form as well as his choice of the olive groves as an evocative subject.

Vincent van Gogh, Olive Grove , November1889, oil on canvas, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

Vincent van Gogh, Olive Grove , November 1889, oil on canvas, Gothenburg Museum of Art, Sweden. Photo: Magnus Mårtensson, Swedish National Heritage Board CCBY

Van Gogh and the Olive Groves follows the arc of Van Gogh’s experimentation with the motif, starting with his earliest encounters with Saint-Rémy’s olive trees in June 1889. As was typical for the artist when approaching a new subject, he began by making naturalistic studies, employing the Impressionists’ short and flickering brushstrokes and high-keyed palette to capture the sensation of olive trees shimmering in the intense heat and light of Provence in the summertime. After a severe health crisis that began in July and left him largely incapacitated for six weeks, Van Gogh returned to the olive trees that September-October.   

The paintings from this second phase of production are marked by a stylistic shift spurred by Van Gogh’s correspondence with friends and fellow artists Émile Bernard and Paul Gauguin—who had recently produced their own renderings of the motif in their modern paintings of Christ in the Garden of Olives—and, subsequently, his renewed conviction of the importance of observing the subject from life. The fall olive groves demonstrate an occasional return to the ochre palette or brilliant Divisionist brushstrokes that defined earlier phases of his career, in addition to a new emphasis on the symbolic potential of color, brushstroke, and motif to convey feelings of hope and spiritual consolation. The last group of paintings in the series includes figures of harvesters picking olives in the lush groves—a testament to the artist’s lifelong exploration of the cycles of life and his belief in the healing powers of art and nature. 

Vincent van Gogh, Olive Trees , June 1889, oil on canvas, National Galleries Scotland. Purchased 1934

The exhibition also contextualizes the olive grove series in Van Gogh’s oeuvre by exploring the artist’s tendency to produce works in series or decorative ensembles dedicated to specific subjects, taking a closer look at select examples from key periods of his production, as well as at the larger series of paintings dedicated to motifs he considered quintessential to Provence, to which the olive groves belong.

Additionally, Van Gogh and the Olive Groves highlights new discoveries on the artist’s palette, techniques, and materials, as seen across the 15 paintings in the series. The product of a collaborative conservation and scientific research initiative launched by the organizing institutions in partnership with the various collections that hold the paintings, and helmed by Kathrin Pilz, Paintings Conservator at the Van Gogh Museum, these findings provide new insight into the chronological sequence of the paintings within the series, Van Gogh’s application of paint in the studio versus en plein air, and his use of unstable pigments.  

Vincent van Gogh, The Olive Trees , June 1889, oil on canvas, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Mrs. John Hay Whitney Bequest. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

“These fascinating paintings clearly held an important place for Van Gogh within his oeuvre, making it that much more surprising they had not yet been the subject of a dedicated study or exhibition,” said curators Nicole Myers and Nienke Bakker. “After years of research, we are thrilled to reunite the olive grove series for the first time for audiences in the United States and Europe and to present exciting new discoveries on the paintings and artist alike.”

Van Gogh and the Olive Groves is co-organized by the Dallas Museum of Art and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. 

The Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibitions

 

Part of the Alexander von Humboldt exhibition, Frederic Edwin Church, Aurora Borealis, 1865, oil on canvas, 56 x 83 1/2 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Eleanor Blodgett, 1911.4.1. Photo by Gene Young.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum and its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, reopen to the public Friday, May 14. This is the second reopening of the museum following closures on March 14, 2020 and on Nov. 23, 2020 as a public health precaution due to the COVID-19 global pandemic. The museum has negotiated extensions into the summer for its three major exhibitions that were shuttered last fall.

“I am overjoyed to welcome visitors back to the Smithsonian American Art Museum and our Renwick Gallery to experience our relevant and impactful exhibitions—from powerful and vibrant prints by Chicanx artists and collaborators to a fossilized mastodon skeleton to a new site-specific artwork that transforms an entire gallery at the Renwick into earthly and heavenly realms,” said Stephanie Stebich, the Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “We also are deeply grateful to the collectors, museums and foundations for their continued generosity during these unprecedented times by agreeing to extend loans, in some cases for a second time, as well as the extraordinary effort of our staff to develop and install these thought-provoking projects.”

Part of the “¡Printing the Revolution!" exhibition, Leonard Castellanos, RIFA, from Méchicano 1977 Calendario, 1976, screenprint on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 2012.53.1, © 1976, Leonard Castellanos

The landmark exhibition, “¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now” was open for a mere three days in November 2020 before the Smithsonian closed for the second time due to the pandemic. The exhibition is the first to unite historic civil rights-era prints alongside works by contemporary printmakers, including several that embrace expanded graphics that exist beyond works on paper. Many Chicanx artists came of age during the civil rights, labor, anti-war, feminist and LGBTQ+ movements and channeled the period’s social activism into assertive aesthetic statements that announced a new political and cultural consciousness among people of Mexican descent in the United States. “¡Printing the Revolution!” explores the rise of Chicanx graphics within these early social movements and the ways in which Chicanx artists and their collaborators since then have advanced innovative printmaking practices attuned to social justice.

“¡Printing the Revolution!” features 119 works drawn from the museum’s leading collection of Latinx art. The exhibition opens with the powerful, large-scale installation “Justice for Our Lives,” a major work by Oree Originol. The collection of portraits includes the late George Floyd along with others who were killed during altercations with U.S. law enforcement since 2014. The museum’s Chicanx graphics holdings rose significantly with an important gift in 1995 from the renowned scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto. Since then, other major donations and an ambitious acquisition program have built one of the largest museum collections of Chicanx graphics on the East Coast. The exhibition will be on view at the museum’s main building from Friday, May 14, through Sunday, Aug. 8. Following its run in Washington, D.C., it will travel to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth.

The museum’s critically acclaimed exhibition “Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature and Culture” reveals how the influential naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) shaped American perceptions of nature and the way American cultural identity became grounded in our relationship with the environment. It is the first exhibition to examine Humboldt's impact on five spheres of American cultural development: the visual arts, sciences, literature, politics and exploration, between 1804 and 1903. It centers on the fine arts as a lens through which to understand how deeply intertwined Humboldt’s ideas were with America’s emerging identity. Prominently featured in the exhibition is the original “Peale Mastodon” skeleton, on loan from the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, with ties to Humboldt, the influential artist Charles Willson Peale and an emerging American national identity in the early 19th century. Its inclusion represents a homecoming for this important fossil that has been in Europe since 1847 and emphasizes that natural history and natural monuments bond Humboldt with the United States. The exhibition will be on view from Friday, May 14, through Sunday, July 11. It will not travel.

Part of the Renwick Invitational 2020, Debora Moore, Magnolia (detail), from the series Arboria, 2018, blown and sculpted glass and natural boulder, approx. 104 x 112 x 30 in., Tacoma Art Museum, Museum purchase with Art Acquisition Funds, 2019.8. Photo by Rozarii Lynch

At the museum’s Renwick Gallery, the exhibition “Forces of Nature: Renwick Invitational 2020” examines how nature and art have the power to reframe perspectives and offer moments of release and inspiration in a world that is increasingly chaotic and detached from the physical landscape. Featuring artists Lauren Fensterstock, Timothy Horn, Debora Moore and Rowland Ricketts, the exhibition showcases the artists’ heightened ecological awareness that stems from a desire to commune with and advocate for the natural world. The artists, who use a wide range of craft media—from fiber and mosaic to metal and glass—examine the long history of art’s power to engage with the natural world through unconventional and highly personal perspectives. “Forces of Nature” is the ninth installment of the Renwick Invitational. Established in 2000, this biennial showcase highlights mid-career and emerging makers who are deserving of wider national recognition. The exhibition will be on view from Friday, May 14, through Sunday, Aug. 15. It will not travel.

Visitors wearing masks exploring the galleries at the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Photo by Albert Ting.

Other installations that return to public view at the museum’s main building include a focused installation that features recently acquired photographs by Dawoud Bey in conversation with a painting by African American modernist William H. Johnson that refer to the Underground Railroad; and “The Automobile and American Art,” featuring a study collection of 100 model cars recently donated by Albert H. Small. At the Renwick Gallery is Janet Echelman’s “1.8 Renwick,” the popular fiber and lighting installation suspended from the ceiling of the Grand Salon.

Visitor information is available on the museum’s website at AmericanArt.si.edu/visit.

America’s Impressionism: Echoes of a Revolution

Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis 

(now through May 9, 2021)

San Antonio Museum of Art 

(June 11–September 5, 2021) 

Brandywine River Museum of Art, Chadds Ford, PA 

(October 9, 2021–January 9, 2022)

Willard Metcalf (American, 1858 – 1925) Poppy Field (Landscape at Giverny) , 1886. Oil on canvas, 10 5/8 x 18 5/16 inches. Collection of J. Jeffrey and Ann Maire Fox.

Image courtesy Questroyal Fine Art

Theodore Robinson (1852 – 1896) Yacht Club Basin, Cos Cob Harbor , 1894. Oil on board, 19 x 22 1/2 in. Brandywine River Museum of Art, Richard M. Scaife Bequest

Emma Richardson Cherry (American, 1859 – 1954) On the Gallery, at the Pines , 1896. Oil on canvas, 24 x 36 inches. Collection of Juli and Sam Steven

John Leslie Breck (American, 1860 – 1899) Grey Day on the Charles , 1894. Oil on canvas, 18 x 22 inches. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, J. Harwood and Louise B. Cochrane Fund for American Art, 90.151 Photo: Katherine Wetzel/ ©Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Cecilia Beaux (1855 – 1942) Dorothea in the Woods , 1897. Oil on canvas, 53 1/4 x 40 1/4 inches. Whitney Museum of American Art; Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz, Inv. N. 70.158. Digital image © Whitney Museum of American Art / Licensed by Scala / Art Resource, NY

F. Childe Hassam (American, 1859 – 1935) Point Lobos, Carmel , 1914. Oil on canvas, 28 5/16 x 36 3/16 inches. Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Mr and Mrs. William Preston Harrison Collection (29.18.2) Photo © Museum Associates/ LACMA

6. E. Charlton Fortune (American, 1886 – 1969) Feeding Chickens, Monterey , 1918. Oil on canvas, 28 x 26 inches. Crocker Art Museum, Melza and Ted Barr Collection, 2010.9.

Theodore Earl Butler (American, 1861 – 1936) Grainstacks, Giverny , ca. 1897. Oil on canvas, 21 1/4 x 28 3/4 inches. Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Museum purchase by the Dixon Life Members Society, 1991.4

America’s Impressionism: Echoes of a Revolution is a major new traveling exhibition that explores the development of Impressionism in the United States. While Impressionism made its public debut in Paris with a shocking exhibition in 1874, the style did not fully take hold in America until more than a decade later, after a major exhibition of French works in New York in 1886. With this belated arrival, American Impressionism might be understood merely as the adaptation of techniques and visual vocabularies honed by French masters. Through more than 70 works assembled from public and private collections, America’s Impressionism redefines our understanding of the movement to show how American artists drew upon transatlantic exchange to create an independent movement, uniquely shaped by American sensibilities and regional landscapes.

Impressionism has been one of the most enduring styles of art ever produced, and its complex and often contradictory American articulation has captured interest for more than a century. Yet, the development of American Impressionism remains understudied, and the artists who worked within the genre have not been given ample credit for the ways in which they made this imported style wholly their own. Featuring works by Cecilia Beaux, William Merritt Chase, Willard Metcalf, Emma Richardson Cherry, Jane Peterson, and Theodore Wendel, among numerous others, the exhibition reveals a more nuanced history of the artistic exchange between the U.S. and France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the trajectories of Impressionism across the Atlantic.

Claude Monet modeled a form of Impressionism that held particular appeal for American artists, and the exhibition includes a selection of works that represent an enclave of Americans working in Giverny under his tutelage, including Metcalf and Wendel. The exhibition also features American artist and an exhibitor with the French Impressionist group, Mary Cassatt. While American artists working abroad in Europe drew upon Impressionist pedagogy, artists working in communities across the U.S. truly established an Americanized version of the international style. As these artists developed their own aesthetic approaches and techniques, American Impressionism took on specific regional characteristics. For example, in the Northeast, where impressionism thrived, it was honed by artists featured in the exhibition, such as Daniel Garber, who worked in New Hope, Pennsylvania, John Henry Twachtman in Cos Cob, Connecticut, and Childe Hassam in Massachusetts and New York. The exhibition traces the presence of Impressionism as it moved actively from the Northeast to the Southwest and into the California coast, creating a rich and intricate national fabric of artistic interpretation.

The San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA) will host the exhibition from June 11 to Sept. 5, 2021. As Impressionism spread west, Texas, too, became an important place. To engage audiences with this particular history, SAMA’s presentation of America’s Impressionism will include outstanding works by Texas artists, including Onderdonk, Dawson Dawson-Watson, and José Arpa, among others. These paintings are drawn from SAMA’s permanent collection as well as from local private collections. American Impressionists were attracted to Texas’s varied landscapes, from the wildflowers of the hill country to the plains of North Texas and the arid West Texas countryside.

The SAMA presentation is further distinguished by the incorporation of masterworks from the San Antonio-based Marie and Hugh Halff Collection, a premier collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American impressionist painting. Among the numerous works to be featured are Frederick Carl Frieseke’s striking painting The Bathers (about 1914), Childe Hassam’s The New York Bouquet (1917), and Edmund C. Tarbell’s Girl Cutting Patterns (1907-8). 

Originally curated by Amanda C. Burdan of the Brandywine River Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, the exhibition is also co-organized by SAMA and the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee. At SAMA, it is curated by Yinshi Lerman-Tan, Acting Associate Curator of American and European Art.

The exhibition is also accompanied by a catalogue published in conjunction with Yale University Press, which includes a full complement of color plates and new essays on the subject by the exhibition’s curators and additional contributors (Amanda C. Burdan; with contributions by Emily C. Burns, Ross King, William Keyse Rudolph, Kevin Sharp, and Scott A. Shields).

This comprehensive book presents an original and nuanced history of the American engagement with the French style, one that was both richer and more ambivalent than mere imitation. Showcasing key works from public and private collections across the United States, this expansive catalogue contextualizes celebrated figures, such as Claude Monet (1840–1926) and William Merritt Chase (1849–1916), among their unduly overlooked—and often female—counterparts, such as Lilla Cabot Perry (1848–1933), Emma Richardson Cherry (1859–1954), and Evelyn McCormick (1862–1948). Essays from leading scholars of the movement expand upon the geography and chronology of Impressionism in America, investigating regional variants and new avenues opened by the experiment. Beautifully illustrated, this volume is a landmark event in the understanding of an important era in American art.