Cézanne Drawing

—The Museum of Modern Art presents a major exhibition offering a new look at the celebrated modern artist Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) through close attention to his process in pencil and watercolor and fresh insights into this profoundly original yet lesser-known body of work. Cézanne Drawing, on view at MoMA from June 6 through September 25, 2021, is the first major effort in the United States to unite drawings from across the artist’s entire career, tracing the development of his practice on paper and exploring his working methods. More than 250 works on paper— including drawings, sketchbooks, and rarely seen watercolors—are shown alongside a selection of related oil paintings, all drawn from MoMA’s collection as well as public and private collections from around the world. Presented together, these works reveal how this fundamental figure of modern art—more often recognized as a painter—produced his most radical works on paper. Cézanne Drawing is organized by Jodi Hauptman, Senior Curator, and Samantha Friedman, Associate Curator, with Kiko Aebi, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints. Laura Neufeld, Associate Conservator, David Booth Department of Conservation, is a key collaborator, part of the project’s curatorialconservation partnership. 

Cézanne has long been recognized as a crucial artistic link between the 19th and 20th centuries. Cézanne Drawing returns works on paper to their central position within the artist’s oeuvre, demonstrating the extent to which this medium facilitated his legendary innovations and emphasizing how he used particular materials and techniques to generate meaning. Drawing was foundational to Cézanne’s practice from the late 1850s until his death in 1906. Making daily use of loose sheets and sketchbook pages, the artist produced over 2,100 works on paper over the course of his career. Cézanne preferred standard materials that were easily prepared, widely available, and relatively inexpensive: industrially produced pencils, watercolors, and papers, purchased from art suppliers in Aix-en-Provence and Paris. For Cézanne, drawing was an activity of interest and importance in its own right—one that facilitated diligent, daring investigations of surface and depth, line and color, vision and touch, and finish and un-finish. Elaborated over the course of days, weeks, and even years, Cézanne’s works on paper were paramount to his development of a resolutely modern artistic idiom.

Cézanne Drawing traces this development through graphic works dating from the artist’s early career in the 1860s to his final years at his Les Lauves studio at the start of the 20th century. The exhibition introduces visitors to Cézanne’s so-called study sheets, which feature an array of distinct subjects depicted in different scales, styles, orientations, and perspectives. With their unlikely juxtapositions, these works make visible the artist’s relentless pursuit of relationships—material, formal, and conceptual—between seemingly disparate motifs and genres. The study sheets provide an entry point to the associative nature of Cézanne’s drawing practice and foreground the ways that drawing served him as an experimental, iterative mode of thinking. 

Equally imperative to the presentation of Cézanne’s graphic works are his sketchbooks, another vehicle for rigorous study and formal play. The artist is known to have used at least 19 sketchbooks during his lifetime, and their pages comprise a vast repository of themes to which he returned frequently: intimate portrayals of his family members; precise depictions of household objects; loose sketches of the natural world; exuberant renderings of bathers; and copies of classical and Baroque paintings and sculptures. In addition to study sheets, sketchbooks, and other drawings in pencil, the exhibition features a wide selection of large-scale watercolors—a once-in-a-generation opportunity to see so many of these rarely exhibited works gathered in one place. 

In addition to study sheets, sketchbooks, and other drawings in pencil, the exhibition features a wide selection of large-scale watercolors—a once-in-a-generation opportunity to see so many of these rarely exhibited works gathered in one place. Moving deftly between pencil and watercolor while at work on individual compositions, Cézanne cultivated a dynamic relationship between the two mediums. His graphite lines and watercolor washes variously converge and diverge, and he explored the translucence and luminosity of watercolor across these works. 

Finally, the exhibition incorporates a select number of carefully chosen paintings that further key arguments. Through new curatorial and conservation research, Cézanne Drawing illuminates the technical means that enabled the artist’s extraordinary vision: the searching, multiple lines that together describe a form; the repetitions and transformations that realize a composition; and the layering of watercolor that conjures kaleidoscopic color. It also explores the ways in which the work of this pioneer of modernism remains continually resonant, from his preoccupation with the temporality of everyday life, to his immersion in the natural world, to his daring approach to the human figure. Encompassing vibrant still lifes, prismatic landscapes, and carefully choreographed bathers, these works on paper also reveal lesser-known themes and ideas that expand common conceptions of this artist, such as a thread of violence, an interest in narrative, and a concern with intimacy. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, Cézanne Drawing, which offers a career-spanning appraisal of the artist’s works on paper, tracing the development of his practice, illuminating his themes and subjects, exploring his working methods, and ultimately revealing the essential role drawing played in shaping Cézanne’s vision. It is edited by Jodi Hauptman and Samantha Friedman, with contributions by Kiko Aebi, Annemarie Iker, and Laura Neufeld. 216 pages, 328 illustrations. Hardcover.

Images

Paul Cézanne. The Apotheosis of Delacroix. 1878-80 (completed later). Pencil, ink, and watercolor on wove paper, with a strip added at the bottom, 7 7/8 × 9 3/16″ (20 × 23.3 cm). The British Museum, London © The Trustees of the British Museum

Paul Cézanne. Bathers(Baigneurs). 1885–90. Watercolor and pencil on wove paper, 5 × 8 1/8″ (12.7 × 20.6 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Lillie P. Bliss Collection. Photo © 2021 MoMA, NY

 

Paul Cézanne. Mont Sainte-Victoire (La Montagne Sainte-Victoire vue des Lauves). 1902–06. Watercolor and pencil on wove paper, 16 3/4 x 21 3/8″ (42.5 x 54.2 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David Rockefeller. Photo © 2021 MoMA, NY

Paul Cézanne. Forest Landscape. 1904–06. Pencil and watercolor on paper, 18 5/8 × 23 5/8″ (47.3 × 60 cm). Private collection

Paul Cézanne. Still Life with Blue Pot. 1900-06. Pencil and watercolor on paper, 18 15/16 × 24 7/8″ (48.1 × 63.2 cm). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Alphonse Mucha: Art Nouveau Visionary

 The North Carolina Museum of Art 

October 23, 2021 through January 23, 2022

Alphonse Mucha, Daydream (Rêverie), 1897, color lithograph, 28 5/8 × 21 3/4 in., Mucha Trust Collection, © 2021 Mucha Trust

Mucha, Precious Stones Amethyst

Mucha, Salon Des Cent

Mucha with posters for Sarah Bernhardt.

The North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) announced its fall 2021 exhibitions, including Alphonse Mucha: Art Nouveau Visionary, opening October 23, 2021, and on view through January 23, 2022. 

Czech-born Alphonse Mucha (1860–1939) was one of the most influential and celebrated artists in turn-of-the-20th-century Paris. He is best known for his graphic work, such as theater posters for superstar actress Sarah Bernhardt and decorative panels and advertisements featuring graceful women. Mucha created a distinctive approach characterized by harmonious compositions, sinuous forms, organic lines, and muted colors, which became synonymous with the decorative style called art nouveau.

“This fall the North Carolina Museum of Art is pleased to present a series of exhibitions that span the 19th to the 21st centuries and offer insight into art made in different parts of the world,” says Valerie Hillings, Museum director. “Our fall season features internationally beloved and recognized work by Alphonse Mucha alongside local, national, and international contemporary artists who explore a range of techniques and social and cultural histories.”  

Despite the powerful impact of Mucha’s style, his ideas behind its development are less well known. Alphonse Mucha: Art Nouveau Visionary draws on the latest research to examine the theoretical aspects of his style, which evolved as a language for communication with the wider public. Featuring some 100 objects from the Mucha Trust collection, including rarely seen works from the artist’s family, the exhibition looks at Mucha’s contributions to the art nouveau style and how he later used his visual language to express his vision for an independent Czechoslovak nation.

Auguste Rodin, Femmes damnés

The international scope of Mucha’s aesthetic, influences, and impact are elaborated in the exhibition and accompanying catalogue through the addition of works from the North Carolina Museum of Art collection and new research on their relationship to Mucha’s art and times.

American Art Week from May 15-22

 

From Debra Force, Maurice Brazil Prendergast (1858-1924) Bathers, circa 1912, oil on canvas, 22 ¼ x 34 ¼ in.

From Avery Galleries, John Whorf (1903 – 1959) Venice , 1925. Watercolor, 14 ½ x 21 inches. Signed and dated lower right: John Whorf 25.

From Jonathan Boos, Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones, In Apron Strings, 1911. Oil on canvas. 30 x 32 inches. Signed lower right.

From Meredith Ward Fine Art, Frederick Kann (1884-1965) Untitled, c. 1938. Oil and cork on canvas board, 18 x 24 inches.

The American Art Fair celebrates spring 2021 American Art Week from May 15-22 with Open Houses by appointment at most galleries during the opening weekend, featured in-gallery exhibitions, as well as online highlights at theamericanartfair.comthrough June 30.

The Spring 2021 American Art Week heralds new May dates for The American Art Fair beginning in 2022. As announced by the Fair’s Founder, Tom Colville: “We are initiating a comprehensive collaboration under the umbrella of American Art Week with The American Art Fair, lectures and other programming, museum and gallery exhibitions, and the spring American paintings sales to make New York in May a destination for collectors and curators.”

Exhibitors in American Art Week include Alexandre Gallery, American Illustrators Gallery, Avery Galleries, Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts, Conner • Rosenkranz, D. Wigmore Fine Art, D C Moore Gallery, Debra Force Fine Art, Forum Gallery, Godel & Co., Graham Shay 1857, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, John H. Surovek Gallery, Jonathan Boos, Kraushaar Galleries, Menconi + Schoelkopf, Meredith Ward Fine Art, Questroyal Fine Art, Taylor | Graham, Thomas Colville Fine Art, and Vose Galleries.

Gallery highlights include works by Reynolds Beale, Ludwig Bemelmans, George Wesley Bellows, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Robert Indiana, Jacob Lawrence, Frederick Kann, Edward Lamson Henry, Doris Lee, Harriet Frishmuth, Frederick MacMonnies, Willard Leroy Metcalf, Paul Howard Manship, Reginald Marsh, Alfred Maurer, George L.K. Morris, Dale Nichols, Maurice Brazil Prendergast, Raphael Soyer, and Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones.

American Art Week gallery exhibitions include Debra Force Fine Art’s American Impressionism and An Adventurous Spirit: Julian Alden Weir (both through June 18; Hirschl & Adler Galleries’The American Dream: Eight Decades of Reality and Imagination in American Art; and Godel & Co., Inc.’s Director’s Choice: 19th- and Early 20th-Century American Paintings.

Meredith Ward Fine Art’s exhibition Frank Diaz Escalet (1930-2012) features the Puerto Rican-born artist who lived in New York City and Maine, where he created bold and innovative images based on the everyday lives of working people. Largely self-taught, Escalet was a painter and master leather crafter and developed his own technique for creating images out of cut leather that vividly capture the mood of the scene.

Two gallery exhibitions relate to the founding of American Abstract Artists. D. Wigmore Fine Art’s The Birth of American Abstraction: Revisiting the 1936 Concretionist Exhibition considers the 1936 exhibition organized by Albert Eugene Gallatin as a protest against Alfred Barr’s exclusion of American artists in MoMA’s Cubism and Abstract Art. Gallatin’s exhibition included works by Charles Biederman, Alexander Calder, John Ferren, George L. K. Morris, and Charles Green Shaw. In the summer the exhibition traveled to Paris (Galerie Pierre) and London (Mayor Gallery) and Gallatin replaced Calder as the fifth exhibitor. Menconi + Schoelkopf’s The Park Avenue Cubists focuses on Gallatin’s circle which established American Abstract Artists later in 1936 to create opportunities for abstract artists decades before abstract painting would become synonymous with New York painting. A related exhibition focused on American abstract artists is Kraushaar Galleries’ The Contours of Abstraction (through July 2) with works by Esphyr Slobodkina and Dorothy Dehner among others.

From American Illustrators Gallery, Ludwig Bemelmans (1898-1962) IN THE AUTUMN WIND HE BOASTED, THAT HE FLEW THE HIGHEST KITE, c. 1956 Gouache and blank ink on artist's board 18 3/4" x 31 5/8" Signed and dated lower right: Bemelmans and Paris ‘56 Madeline and the Bad Hat, by: Ludwig Bemelmans, New York, 1956, pp. 14-15

From D. Wigmore Fine Art, Doris Lee (1904 - 1983) Archer. 39 ½ x 51 ½ inches. Oil on canvas. Signed lower right: Doris Lee

From Graham Shay 1857, Andrew Dasburg (American, 1887 – 1979) Fauve Still Life, circa 1920. Oil on canvas, 20 H. x 16 W. in.

From DC Moore Gallery, Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) Supermarket - Celebration, 1994. Gouache on paper, 26 x 20 1/2 inches.

Cranach to Canaletto: Masterpieces from the Bemberg Foundation

 San Diego Museum 

June 18, 2021, through Sept. 27, 2021

Lucas Cranach the Elder, Hercules at the Court of Omphale , 1531. Oil on panel. Collection from the Fondation Bemberg. © Fondation Bemberg and RMN

The San Diego Museum of Art plans to open to two summer exhibitions, Cranach to Canaletto: Masterpieces from the Bemberg Foundation and Everything You See Could Be A Lie: Photorealistic Drawings by Ana de Alvear. From Old Master paintings to contemporary, hyper-realistic drawings, works from these exhibitions are rarely seen in the U.S. and will be on view at the San Diego Museum beginning June 18, 2021, through Sept. 27, 2021.

(Concurrently, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will be showing modern French paintings from the Bemberg Foundation from June 27 to Sept. 19, 2021, in Monet to Matisse: Impressionism to Modernism.)

Lucas Cranach the Elder, Portrait of a Young Girl, 16th century. Oil on panel. Collection from the Fondation Bemberg. © Fondation Bemberg and RMN.

Cranach to Canaletto: Masterpieces from the Bemberg Foundation

Organized by the Bemberg Foundation, based at the historic Hôtel d’Assézat in Toulouse, France, the exhibition features over 80 works produced between 1500 and 1800. This exhibition marks the first time these works have been shown publicly in the U.S. and features some of the biggest names in European painting.

Artists represented include renowned Venetian painters: Jacopo Robusti (Tintoretto), Tiziano Vecellio (Titian), Paolo Veronese, Giovanni Antonio Canal (Canaletto), Giandomenico Tiepolo and Alessandro Longhi; French artists: Jean Clouet, Jean-Marc Nattier, François Boucher and Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun; and Flemish and Dutch painters: Pieter Brueghel The Younger, Jan Van Goyen and Anthony Van Dyck. Four Lucas Cranach the Elder paintings will also be on display, a testament to Bemberg’s appreciation of this seminal figure of the German Renaissance. 

Grouped thematically in four sections, Cranach to Canaletto: Masterpieces from the Bemberg Foundation explores themes of portraiture, landscape, mythology and domestic environments with layers of storytelling within each painting. Along the way, issues of perceived beauty, romance, realism and faith are considered. The exhibition space was also created specifically to highlight the collection, including gallery archways inspired by the Hôtel d’Assézat architecture, long sightlines and a dramatic, intimate final section.

The exhibition is composed entirely of works from The Bemberg Foundation and is co-curated by Philippe Cros, Director of the Bemberg Foundation, and Michael Brown, Ph.D., Curator of European Art at The San Diego Museum of Art. 

Georges Bemberg was an Argentina-born French collector, world traveler and Harvard-trained scholar, who amassed an extraordinary collection of Western art from the end of the Middle Ages to the 20th century. Bemberg’s private collection was preserved through the Foundation, which is currently closed for renovations. 

Antonio Canal (aka Canaletto), View of Mestre , ca. 1740. Oil on canvas. Collection from the Fondation Bemberg. © Fondation Bemberg and RMN

“It is an exceptional and unique opportunity to collaborate with the Bemberg Foundation and bring these magnificent masterpieces from France to the U.S. for the first time in our Cranach to Canaletto: Masterpieces from the Bemberg Foundation exhibition,” said Roxana Velásquez, Maruja Baldwin Executive Director at The San Diego Museum of Art. “This collection is very complementary to our own permanent collection and a true delight for the senses.” 

Cape and Island Vistas—Cape Ann and Monhegan Island: Contrasted New England Art Colonies

Monhegan Museum of Art & History, Monhegan Island, Maine

July 1 through September 30, 2021

Cape Ann Museum

October 23, 2021–January 16, 2022

 

Movalli, Charles 1945-2016 Marine Railways 2014 36 x 48 in. Collection of the Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, MA, Gift of Dale Ratcliff Movalli, 2016 William Lester Stevens (1888-1969) Harbor Scene, Gloucester. Rockport Art Association & Museum Permanent Collection.

Theresa Bernstein (1890-2002) Studio Garden. Rockport Art Association & Museum Permanent Collection.

James E. Fitzgerald (1899-1971) At the Graveyard. Monhegan Museum of Art & History, James Fitzgerald Legacy, Gift of Anne Hubert 2004.

Eric Hudson (1864-1932) Under Dark Sky. Monhegan Museum of Art & History, Gift of James F. O'Gorman and Jean Baer.

Cape Ann and Monhegan Island Vistas: Contrasted New England Art Colonies will explore the relationship between the historic and still-thriving art colonies of Monhegan, Maine, and Cape Ann, Massachusetts, featuring the work of artists connected with both places. Organized in collaboration with the Cape Ann Museum, this exhibition will be on view at the Monhegan Museum of Art & History, Monhegan Island, Maine, from July 1 through September 30, 2021.

At the turn of the 20th century, American artists flocked to the new summer art colonies that stretched from California to New England. This exhibition pairs paintings and prints by artists who worked at both of two very different art colonies in the northeast: Cape Ann, Massachusetts, and Monhegan Island, Maine. Separated by one hundred miles of ocean, these colonies, like many others, became important crossroads in the history of American art, hosting major artists through the years. Each of the artists represented visited and/or lived in both Cape Ann and Monhegan: Theresa Bernstein, Eric Hudson, Leon Kroll, Hayley Lever, James Fitzgerald, Lester Stevens, Don Stone, and Stow Wengenroth, among others.

Cape and Island Vistas explores how these artists depicted aspects of each location, reflecting the differences between the city-size Cape Ann—with its large industrial harbor in Gloucester, a sizable fishing fleet, and the extended Rockport seashore—and the tiny offshore island of Monhegan, with its striking cliff formations and modest village harbor. Two paintings by Ken Gore, for example, embrace the contrasts in the two locales’ very different, but equally iconic, coastlines. One, Sea Mist, captures the crash of rushing waves at the base of Monhegan’s rocky cliffs; conversely, the sea shown in The Beach, painted on Cape Ann, rolls slowly onto a gentle strand. Landscape painter and printmaker Jacqueline “Jackie” Hudson spent much of her life on Monhegan but also had a studio in Cape Ann. Her energetic Church Fair, Main Street, Rockport is a colorful and lighthearted view of Cape people at play, while her watercolor Storm in Monhegan Harbor is dramatically different: the mood is somber; the colors are menacingly dreary; and the water inside the harbor is at a boil. A pair of scenes by European-trained Boston School artist and Cape Ann resident Aldro T. Hibbard, in turn, records the difference between Rockport harbor architecture in winter, centered on a shed that came to be known to artists and public alike as “Motif No. 1,” and a summery view of the small harbor at Monhegan.

Paul Strisik (1918-1998) Monhegan Pier. Monhegan Museum of Art & History, Gift of Nancy Strisik, 2002.

Emile Gruppe (1896-1978) Gloucester Harbor. Rockport Art Association & Museum Permanent Collection

Charles Movalli (1945-2016) Marine Railways. Collection of the Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, MA, Gift of Dale Ratcliff Movalli, 2016.

Don Stone (1929-2015) Winter Bird Watchers. Courtesy of the Don Stone Trust.

Cape and Island Vistas—Cape Ann and Monhegan Island: Contrasted New England Art Colonies includes several works from the collections of the Monhegan Museum of Art and History, the Cape Ann Museum, the Rockport Art Association, and private collections. Co-organized with the Cape Ann Museum, the exhibition will travel to the Cape Ann Museum in the fall, where it will be on view October 23, 2021–January 16, 2022. A 64-page, fully illustrated catalogue with contributions by James F. O’Gorman, Martha Oaks, Oliver Barker, and Jennifer Pye, will accompany the exhibition. The catalog will be available for purchase in the Monhegan Museum Store or online for $20.

Extra Ordinary: Magic, Mystery and Imagination in American Realism

The Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia 

Through Sunday, Jun 13, 2021

Saturday, Feb 27, 2021 — 

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“Extra Ordinary” surveys a range of American artists who embraced realism, representation and classical artistic techniques in the face of the rising tide of abstraction at mid-century. Through sharp focus, suggestive ambiguity and an uncanny assemblage of ordinary things, their works not only show that the extraordinary is possible, but also conjure the strangeness and wonder of everyday life. 

Long overshadowed by the rise of abstract expressionism in the 1950s, magic realism’s reputation is on the way up again. The Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia will present the exhibition “Extra Ordinary: Magic, Mystery and Imagination in American Realism” from February 27 to June 13, 2021, seeking to reexamine how we define magic realism and expand the canon of artists who worked within this category.

The term “magic realism” was popularized in 1943 during the exhibition “American Realists and Magic Realists” at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), organized by curator Dorothy C. Miller with assistance from museum director Alfred H. Barr Jr. and arts impresario Lincoln Kirstein. The Georgia Museum of Art’s exhibition will include works originally presented in MoMA’s show, including paintings by Ivan Albright, Paul Cadmus, Z. Vanessa Helder and Patsy Santo, as well as other objects by many of the artists it featured.

Magic realism is often compared to surrealism, but while surrealism focuses on the life of the mind, magic realism is grounded in the real world, showing fantastical elements as a part of everyday life. The mood of magic realist works of art is often eerie and uncanny. Mystical components add to their mystery and invite viewers to look more closely. Magic realists were inspired by the German movement known as New Objectivity, and they also adapted aspects of European surrealism into an American visual language.

Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, curator of American art at the museum, organized the exhibition. He said, “Magic realism was very much rooted in ordinary life and was commenting very directly on the everyday experience of people in the United States — from wartime life and its aftermath to key social issues like race and civil rights or workers’ rights, to pressing environmental issues of the time.”

“Extra Ordinary” takes on the challenge of defining magic realism and organizing a diverse group of artists into one style – a style that may be unfamiliar to American audiences and has often been overlooked. The exhibition also emphasizes, in critic Clement Greenberg’s words, “the extreme eclecticism now prevailing” in the American art world during the mid-1900s. In so doing, it highlights a wider constellation of artists — including such women as Gertrude Abercrombie and Honoré Sharrer, such artists of color as Eldzier Cortor and Hughie Lee-Smith, and other artists from farther-flung regions such as Everett Spruce and Patrick Sullivan — who also turned to the mysterious, supernatural and hyperreal to examine key social issues of the day. These artists embraced magic or fantasy not as a means to escape everyday reality but as a way to engage more directly with it.

The exhibition is drawn primarily from two private collections with exceptional holdings in the magical realist genre, as well as major paintings in our own collection by Paul Cadmus, O. Louis Guglielmi, John Brock Lear, and others. It takes as its point of departure the 1943 show “American Realists and Magic Realists” at the Museum of Modern Art — when the term “magic realism” entered the American art historical lexicon — and will feature a suite of paintings originally included in MoMA’s show. By bringing together significant works by Ivan Albright, Cadmus, Philip Evergood, Jared French, Henry Koerner, George Tooker and John Wilde, along with a number of lesser known artists, “Extra Ordinary” reveals the slippery task of categorizing this eccentric group of painters into a single style. After all, the canon of artists we now identify as “magic realists” was codified through a series of exhibitions organized by curators Alfred H. Barr, Dorothy C. Miller and Lincoln Kirstein, among others.

Peter Blume (American, b. Russia, 1906 – 1992), study for “South of Scranton,” 1930. Oil on canvas, 28 × 20 inches. Vero Beach Museum of Art, Museum Purchase with funds provided by the Athena Society, 2017.2 © 2021 The Educational Alliance, Inc. / Estate of Peter Blume / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

“Extra Ordinary” also emphasizes, in critic Clement Greenberg’s words, “the extreme eclecticism now prevailing” in the American art world during this period. In so doing, it highlights a wider constellation of artists — including such women as Gertrude Abercrombie and Honoré Sharrer, such artists of color as Eldzier Cortor and Hughie Lee-Smith, and other artists from farther-flung regions such as Everett Spruce and Patrick Sullivan — who also turned to the mysterious, supernatural and hyperreal to examine key social issues including the dignity of the working class, wartime trauma and environmental concerns. These artists embraced magic or fantasy not as a means to escape everyday reality but as a way to engage more directly with it.

Although the exhibition is not traveling, the museum is publishing a hardcover catalogue to accompany it, with essays by Richmond-Moll and scholar Philip Eliasoph and catalogue entries on every work in the show by scholars including Richmond-Moll, William U. Eiland (the museum’s director), David A. Lewis (professor of art history at Stephen F. Austin State University), Maurita N. Poole (director and curator at Clark Atlanta University Art Museum) and Akela Reason (associate professor of history and director of museum studies at the University of Georgia).



Great article, lots more images

Christie’s American Art Live Auction Live Auction: May 18

Norman Rockwell (1894–1978)
Jeff Raleigh's Piano Solo ("'Oh Lord,' Jeff said prayerfully, 'I wish Alice was here. Oh, I wish she could hear this…'") (The Virtuoso)
oil on canvas
28 ¾ x 22 ¾ in. (73 x 57.8 cm.)
Painted in 1939.
$1,200,000-1,800,000

Christie’s announces its American Art sale on May 18 will present a selection of highlights ranging across the genre from the Hudson River School and art of the American West, to American Illustration and Modernism. The sale will directly follow the 10am live auction Fields of Vision: The Private Collection of Artists Wolf Kahn and Emily Mason which features works from Georgia O’Keeffe, Richard Diebenkorn, and Lee Bontecou among others. The exhibition is open by appointment at Christie’s Rockefeller Center galleries May 15-17.

The American Art sale is highlighted by Norman Rockwell’s Jeff Raleigh’s Piano Solo (“‘Oh Lord,’ Jeff said prayerfully, ‘I wish Alice was here. Oh, I wish she could hear this...’”) (The Virtuoso) which was painted at the precipice of his mature career and published as an illustration for Edmund Ware’s short story “Jeff Raleigh’s Piano Solo” in the May 27, 1939 issue of The Saturday Evening Post (estimate: $1,200,000-1,800,000).  Jeff Raleigh’s Piano Solo embodies the realism, engaging character studies and nostalgic optimism of Rockwell’s best works. Inviting the viewer to also watch in awe as the virtuoso mesmerizes his audience at the piano keys, with help from complex compositional design, the present work beautifully communicates the splendor of the universal language of music in a dynamic and innovative fashion.

Other standout highlights include N.C. Wyeth’s powerful composition The Guardians, a fusion of Illustration and Western art (estimate: $600,000-800,000), and Winslow Homer’s seaside figural watercolor Startled from the collection of Dr. and Mrs. Irving Levitt, which likely depicts the beach at Coney Island and closely relates to a watercolor of the same title in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (estimate: $600,000-800,000).

The auction boasts a strong selection of works by the American Modernist Milton Avery, led by his whimsical large-scale painting Startled Goats  (estimate: $400,000-600,000) and elegant Sleeping Nude (estimate: $300,000-500,000). Additional modern highlights include Frozen Lake, Alaska by Rockwell Kent(estimate: $300,000-500,000), which hails from the important collection of Kent’s patron J.J. Ryan, and a 1936 oil by Jackson Pollock, Untitled (Landscape with Tree to Right) (estimate: $300,000-500,000), that relates to his period studying under Regionalist artist Thomas Hart Benton and demonstrates the emphasis on movement and gesture evident even within his early work.

From the 19th Century, the sale includes a beautiful selection of works by Hudson River School artists, most notably the work of Sanford Robinson Gifford in Lake Sunapee, New Hampshire (estimate: $300,000-500,000) and A Study of Hunter Mountain at Twilight  (estimate: $200,000-300,000), as well as a handsome portrait of Alexander Hamilton by Eastman Johnson (estimate: $100,000-150,000). John Frederick Kensett’s Study on Long Island Sound at Darien, Connecticut has prestigious provenance including the Amon Carter Museum of American Art and extensive exhibition history such as the Whitney Museum of American Art (estimate: $150,000-250,000).