Twilight of American Impressionism: Alice Ruggles Sohier and Frederick A. Bosley

 

Alice Ruggles Sohier, Musing, 1914. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

Frederick A. Bosley, Indian Pond and Mt. Cube, New Hampshire. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

At the Discover Portsmouth Welcome Center (Portsmouth Historical Society) in New Hampshire this summer is a special exhibition on two underappreciated American Impressionists.

“Twilight of American Impressionism: Alice Ruggles Sohier and Frederick A. Bosley” (through Sept. 12, 2021) showcases the largely unsung talents of Alice Ruggles Sohier and Frederick A. Bosley, two American impressionists working at a time when realistic art was falling out of fashion and abstract art was in vogue. 

Alice Ruggles Sohier (1880–1969) and Frederick Andrew Bosley (1881–1942) were students of Edmund Tarbell, trained at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Related by marriage (Frederick was Alice’s brother-in-law), each artist became a master of the so-called Boston School, creating landscapes, interiors, still lifes, portraits, and other refined and elegant works notable for their sublime treatment of light and shade in the grand manner espoused by Tarbell and his disciples. Today, however, as was the case with Gertrude Fiske, Sohier and Bosley’s work is not particularly well known, nor have these important and intriguing artists received the scholarly attention that they deserve. This exhibition attempts to address this situation by bringing to light many of their major works that have slumbered for nearly a century and through enriching the biographical record of their lives.

Frederick A. Bosley, The Open Window, ca. 1931. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

Each artist faced challenges common to Boston School artists as they pursued a traditional career in an art world that was shifting dramatically to more modern modes as the twentieth century progressed. Sohier and Bosley, after enjoying the relative prosperity of the 1910s and 1920s, also had to cope with the effects of the Great Depression in the 1930s. Each also confronted individual obstacles. Alice had to navigate her career and family through a world dominated by men, and Frederick suffered from bouts of depression, especially after his resignation as director of the Museum School in 1931, a decision triggered by the institution’s shift to modernism.

As with the Fiske and Tarbell shows, the Sohier/Bosley exhibition will draw heavily on privately owned works that have rarely been exhibited publicly. Many of the works remain in the families of the artists’ descendants. Those same families also retain some of the furniture and small objects used as props in the paintings, as well as significant caches of period photographs and important documents.

These rich materials allowed us, to an unprecedented extent, to trace the trajectory of each artist’s career, as well as to provide an overview of their respective oeuvre. The result is a greater understanding of these individual overlooked artists and their place in the evolution of the Boston School. Twilight’s twenty-first-century perspective on the work of Sohier and Bosley shows that, while they may have been painting at the end of an era, they were at the height of their art.

Alice Ruggles Sohier, Bittersweet, 1912. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

In total, the exhibition contains about 65 major works with an additional number of studies, drawings, and associated objects, documents, and photographs.

The show will be accompanied by a catalogue published by the Portsmouth Marine Society Press, the publishing arm of the Society. This richly illustrated volume will include an essay by guest curator William Brewster Jr. Brewster, a grandson of Bosley and great-nephew of Sohier, is the author of the only previously published work devoted solely to the two artists, a pamphlet published in 2000 by the Portsmouth Athenaeum to accompany a small show of their work. A catalogue section will illustrate the individual works. The book also will include a bibliography.

Frederick A. Bosley, In the Apple Orchard. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

Alice Ruggles Sohier, from a venerable Massachusetts family, received her art education in the Art Students League in Buffalo, New York, and then at the Museum School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from which she graduated in 1907. During her academic career, she studied with Tarbell and Frank W. Benson, and received many awards and honors. Upon graduation she was the recipient of a prestigious Paige Traveling Scholarship, which provided funds for two years of travel and study in Europe. Upon her return, she exhibited widely from 1910 to 1930, being represented in at least twenty-nine shows throughout the country and receiving a bronze medal at the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915. Her work was noted for its realism and treatment of light in the Tarbell manner. Throughout her career, Sohier faced the challenges common to female artists at the time, including balancing career and family. She married Louis Sohier, an engineer, in 1913. (Louis Sohier’s sister Emily was married to Frederick Bosley.) The Sohiers moved to Pennsylvania and, later, to Concord, Massachusetts. Although Sohier stopped exhibiting ca. 1930, she continued to paint until at least 1959.

Frederick Andrew Bosley was born in Lebanon, New Hampshire. After high school, he too attended the Museum School, finishing the seven-year program in only six years. Like Sohier, he studied with Tarbell and Benson and won a Paige scholarship. In 1913, he succeeded Tarbell as the director of the Department of Drawing and Painting and as instructor in Advanced Painting, influential teaching positions he held until 1931. Bosley was known for his portraits, interiors, and landscapes, as well as for his abilities in pencil and charcoal drawing, and his prize-winning work was also widely exhibited. In the 1920s, he painted at the art colony in Peterborough, N.H., and he also attempted to open his own art school in Piermont. In 1930, the Museum School shifted its focus away from traditional representational painting to a more modern approach. Bosley, along with several other faculty members, resigned in protest the next year. He suffered from depression for the next decade and passed away in 1942.

A new book on Georgia O’Keeffe

A visual feast of flowers, abstractions, cityscapes and landscapes from American modernism’s most iconic painter, a new book on Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) corresponds with the traveling retrospective now on view at Spain's Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. 

Georgia O'Keeffe, Amapolas orientales, 1927. (Oriental Poppies) Óleo sobre lienzo / Oil on canvas. 76,7 x 102,1 cm. Collection of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, Mineápolis. Adquisición del museo / Collection of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Museum Purchase, 1937.1 © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

Georgia O'Keeffe Serie I. N º 3 , 1918 / Series I — No. 3 Óleo sobre tabla / Oil on board . 50,8 × 40,64 cm Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee. Donación de la Jane Bradley Pettit Foundation y The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation / Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee. Gift of Jane Bradley Pettit Foundation and the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation © Milwaukee Art Museum Photograph er credit: Larry Sander

Georgia O'Keeffe Black Place I , 1944 Óleo sobre lienzo / Oil on canvas. 66 x 76,5 cm San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Donación de Charlotte M ack / San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Gift of Charlotte Mack © Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Photograph: Ben Blackwell

Georgia O'Keeffe, Puerta negra con rojo, 1954. (Black Door with Red) Óleo sobre lienzo / Oil on canvas. 121,9 x 213,4 cm. Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA. Legado de Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. / Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA. Bequest of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

Offering a complete survey of Georgia O’Keeffe’s illustrious career, the magnificent new book (Artbook | D.A.P. July 2021) ranges from the works produced between 1910 and 1920 that made her a pioneer of abstraction to her celebrated flower paintings and views of New York, which led to her recognition as one of the key figures in modern American art, and culminating with her paintings of New Mexico.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Almeja y mejillón, 1926. (Clam and Mussel) Óleo sobre lienzo / Oil on canvas. 22,9 x 17,8 cm. Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. Donación de The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation / Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. Gift of The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Photo: Courtesy of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

Georgia O'Keeffe in New Mexico.

Cover of "Georgia O'Keeffe" (Artbook | D.A.P / Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza)

"O’Keeffe was at once global and insistently, radically local. She embraced what she termed the 'wideness and wonder of the world'and was entirely comfortable making her own place within it, however remote...now, it is her art that continues this global journey, connecting us...," writes Cody Hartley, Director of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.

The selection of color plates is accompanied by quotes from O’Keeffe on her art and additional photographic material pertaining to the paintings. The sense of reverence for the world and its forms emerges vividly through O’Keeffe’s words. “The unexplainable thing in nature that makes me feel the world is big far beyond my understanding—to understand maybe by trying to put it into form,” she writes. “To find the feeling of infinity on the horizon line or just over the next hill.”

Also featured are a biography and texts by contributing curators, by scholars at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe and by acclaimed French art writer Catherine Millet. Georgia O’Keeffe is published on the occasion of a major exhibition at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, on view through August 8, 2021.

Georgia O’Keeffe is organized by the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, the Centre Pompidou and the Fondation Beyeler, in partnership with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico. After it has been seen in Madrid, the exhibition travels to Paris and Basel.

Women Behaving Badly: 400 Years of Power and Protest

 Baltimore Museum of Art 

July 18–December 19, 2021

 

Edvard Munch. Vampire. 1895. The Baltimore Museum of Art: Board of Trustees Fund. BMA 1954.1 © Edvard Munch / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris

Scipio Moorhead . Phillis Wheatley, Negro servant to Mr. John Wheatley, of Boston. 18th century. Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Eugène Samuel Grasset . Jeanne d'Arc / Sarah Bernhardt (Joan of Arc / Sarah Bernhardt) . 1890. The Baltimore Museum of Art: Gift of Henry E. Treide. BMA 1956.85.18

Edward Steichen. Anna May Wong, New York. 1930, printed 1940s. The Baltimore Museum of Art: Purchase with exchange funds from the Edward Joseph Gallagher III Memorial Collection; and partial gift of George H. Dalsheimer, Baltimore . BMA 1988.557. © The Estate of Edward Steichen/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

From the heroines of ancient myth to the female trailblazers of the modern era, centuries of independent and rebellious women have been trivialized or condemned through the degrading myths and gendered stereotypes perpetuated in printed imagery. From July 18–December 19, 2021, the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) presents an exhibition that captures visual representations of independent, defiant, and sometimes misunderstood women and explores the role of European and American art in both continuing their condemnation and celebrating their achievements. Women Behaving Badly: 400 Years of Power and Protest features over 75 prints, photographs, and books from the Renaissance to the early 20th century drawn from the BMA’s vast works on paper collection and supplemented with loans from the Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution, Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University, Maryland Center for History and Culture, and private collections.

“Rebellious women who pushed against the confines of their prescribed roles to assert agency and claim their human rights have long been trivialized, shamed, and punished. Art has played a powerful role as a messenger through time and culture, both upholding and reimagining longstanding misconceptions,” said Andaleeb Badiee Banta, BMA Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs. “Women Behaving Badly reclaims the representations of women whose actions were chronicled in visual culture as transgressive, inflammatory, and disruptive and celebrates the groundwork they laid for generations of women afterward.”

The exhibition begins with historic European depictions of the women of ancient Greek and Roman narratives whose independence was often seen as undermining male heroism. These ideas, represented by artists for centuries, shaped Western thought about the role of women in society. Women Behaving Badly continues with archetypal imagery of witches, vampires, and other embodiments of female temptation by artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Francisco Goya, and Edvard Munch, and includes depictions of Eve, Delilah, and Salomé whose Biblical stories are defined by their misdeeds. These narratives—and the artworks that they have inspired—have continued to present female ambition, independence, and achievements as elements to be contained or banished for the betterment of society.

Frances Benjamin Johnston. Frances Benjamin Johnston full-length portrait, seated in front of a fireplace, facing left, holding cigarette in one hand and a beer stein in the other, in her Washington DC studio. 1896.

The second section of the exhibition is devoted to the modern era—from circa 1800 to the period of first-wave feminism in the early 20th century—when women began to break with traditionally domestic designations of wife and mother and assert their presence into the public sphere in an attempt to rectify centuries of disenfranchisement and oppression. Among the formidable women depicted are performers Josephine Baker, Sarah Bernhardt, Isadora Duncan, Bessie Smith, and Anna May Wong; authors Collette, Julia Ward Howe, George Sand, and Virginia Woolf; and activists Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth. Among the artists documenting these women are Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Man Ray, Edward Steichen, Carl Van Vechten, and James Van Der Zee. Female artists who portrayed the pioneering modern women in the exhibition include Bernarda Bryson Shahn, Elizabeth Catlett, Gisèle Freund, Frances Benjamin Johnston, and Sarah Choate Sears. 

Women Behaving Badly: 400 Years of Power and Protest is curated by BMA Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs Andaleeb Badiee Banta. 

The Arch of Nero, a masterpiece by Thomas Cole

 

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has announced that it will display in its American galleries The Arch of Nero, a masterpiece by the great 19th-century American landscape painter Thomas Cole (1801–1848), as a long-term loan from the Thomas H. and Diane DeMell Jacobsen PhD Foundation. Purchased by the Foundation at Sotheby’s American art auction in New York on May 19, 2021, this painting was one of a number of works of art sold by the Newark Museum of Art in Newark, New Jersey, to raise funds for the direct care of its collection. The Arch of Nero was widely considered to be the most important of the works sold by the museum. The Jacobsen Foundation, an organization dedicated to sharing its collection of American art with museums across the country, purchased The Arch of Nero intending to keep this important painting in the public domain. It will be placed on view in Gallery 208 of the Philadelphia Museum of Art beginning July 2, 2021.

Cole painted The Arch of Nero at the height of his powers in 1846, drawing upon his memory and sketches made in Italy in 1832. A boldly composed image with Cole’s typically expressive handling, the subject focuses on a monumental arch, ravaged by the passage of time and seen against green hills and a bright blue sky with gathering clouds. Known as the “Arch of Nero” in Cole’s day, the subject of this painting was actually part of an ancient Roman aqueduct near Tivoli. To Cole, this ruin served as a meditation on the transitory glory of empires and the cycle of rise and fall of civilizations repeated throughout world history. The aura of emperor Nero’s violent and decadent rule (54–68 CE) hangs over this painting, representing in Cole’s vision an era when the Roman republic had devolved into a corrupt and tyrannical empire. Painted in the year that the United States invaded Mexico in a thinly veiled land grab, The Arch of Nero calls to mind the similarly greedy expansion of the Roman empire and its ultimate ruin. As the Cole scholar William L. Coleman has noted, the artist’s lesson on the fate of tyrants, his concern over the erosion of republican values in this country, and his critique of the nation’s expansion of colonial (and slaveholding) territories—implicit in his choice of the subject of this painting and its red, white, and blue-clad figures—remains pertinent today.

From the Brooklyn Museum, Mary Cassatt's "Baby Charles Looking Over His Mother's Shoulder (No. 3)" sold at Sotheby's for $1,593,000 in May 2021 and was acquired by the Jacobsen Foundation. It will go on public view at The Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC, this summer.

Sotheby's

Revered in his lifetime, Cole was recognized as the leader of a group of New York-based landscape artists known as the Hudson River School. His legacy can be seen in the galleries of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the work of artists who were inspired by his example, such as Asher B. Durand, Frederick E. Church, Albert Bierstadt, Sanford Gifford, Martin Johnson Heade, and George Inness. The museum owns two early paintings by Cole, but no painting that represents his finest and most mature work. “We are thrilled to have this great painting in our galleries,” said Kathleen A. Foster, the museum’s Robert L. McNeil Jr. Senior Curator of American Art, “and we are grateful to the Jacobsen Foundation for ensuring that it will continue to be seen by the public for years to come.”

At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Arch of Nero will be presented in context with works by Cole’s Hudson River School peers and other important examples of mid-late 19th-century American landscapes that capture the romanticism of the age.

The mission of the Jacobsen Foundation is “to carefully research and obtain American masterpieces, provide restoration, if necessary, and facilitate long-term loans to accredited major museums and traveling exhibitions.” This unique program allows curators to affordably complement works in their museum galleries and to build enriched education programs. The Foundation Collection, coupled with the founder’s personal collection, is composed of 400 works of art, featuring paintings, sculptures, works on paper, silver, glass, ceramics, and furniture. Since its inception in 2011, the Foundation has offered loans to over 30 major museums, as well as a traveling exhibition drawn from the collection, “The Art of Seating,” that appeared in twenty-eight venues throughout North America.

Another major oil painting recently acquired by the Jacobsen Foundation, Mary Cassatt’s Baby Charles Looking over his Mother’s Shoulder (No. 3) of 1900, was sold by the Brooklyn Museum. Like the Cole, it will continue to be enjoyed by the public, as it will be placed on loan this summer to The Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Maritime Masterpieces

 

With ‘Maritime Masterpieces’ the Maritime Museum Rotterdam is opening the coda to the Boijmans Next Door series, bringing together more than 70 treasures from the two collections. Celebrated works by Bosch, Monet and other masters, dating from the 16th to the 21st century, join forces to tell this tale of marine life and art. 

The post-lockdown reopening of museums on 5 June means that the public can at last visit the brand-new ‘Maritime Masterpieces’ exhibition in the Maritime Museum Rotterdam. From art-historical and marine perspectives, the exhibition tells the tale of shipping and ports over the last six centuries, as well as people’s lived experiences in these settings. ‘Maritime Masterpieces’ brings together more than 70 works, masterpieces from the collections of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and the Maritime Museum. Older works by Hieronymus Bosch, Hendrik Avercamp, Jozef Israëls, Claude Monet and Paul Signac meet modern works by Dolf Henkes, Guido van de Werve and Sasja Hagens. The exhibition is the coda to the Boijmans Next Door project, which involved the Boijmans collection being shown at neighbouring locations, thanks to the generous support of the Droom en Daad Foundation.

Vigour, desire, life

In the Maritime Museum, located at Rotterdam’s historic Leuvehaven harbour, visitors can follow how maritime life has evolved over the centuries. Each painting, ship model, drawing or artefact tells a tale about maritime and port life. This reveals art-historical connections between various styles, but tells the underlying human stories too. 

The emergence of landscape painting, a typically Dutch phenomenon, formed the cradle of marine painting. Marine painters such as Ludolf Bakhuizen, Willem van de Velde the Younger and Jan van de Cappelle, who were contemporaries of Rembrandt and Vermeer, excelled at using the best qualities of marine painting in works that conjoin atmosphere, poetry, maritime life and seascape. 

Industrialisation also gets a look-in: from the first steamship to scientific expeditions to Nova Zembla – everything was captured on canvas. Dutch maritime painters such as Josef Israëls and Hendrik Mesdag reflect the simple lives of fisherfolk. French painters like Signac came to the Netherlands in search of the seascape they knew from paintings, but were also inspired by unfamiliar scenes in the port of Rotterdam. The exhibition then reaches the quayside of the present day, where artists including Frank Stella and Sasja Hagens drew inspiration from interpreting ports as a metaphor for vigour, desire, life.

Ludolf Bakhuizen, Storm op de Hollandse kust, 1682, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Foto door Studio Tromp.

 Paul Signac, Le port de Rotterdam (De haven van Rotterdam), 1907, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Foto door Studio Tromp

Boijmans Next Door

Boijmans Next Door was made possible thanks to the support of the Droom en Daad Foundation. Launched in 2019, this series of exhibitions has involved an ambitious collaboration between Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and eight neighbouring museums and institutions in Rotterdam. A total of about 500 masterpieces from the museum collection have been presented in a new extramural context. This encounter between collections, as here in the Maritime Museum, provides novel insights and new interpolations among the works on display. The narratives and context of these works are thus explored in greater depth and breadth. This is the first time that the Boijmans collection has been showcased by so many Rotterdam institutions with which Boijmans has already been cooperating for years.

The opening date for Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen is 6 November 2021. Here the Boijmans collection, which comprises approximately 151,000 works of art, will be reunited in the world’s first art depot that is fully accessible to the public.

Picasso and the Allure of the South

The Dalí Museum 

Jan. 29-May 22, 2022

 

 Some of Pablo Picasso's most creative and prolific artistic periods took place during extended sojourns in the mountain towns of northern Spain and along the Mediterranean coast of France. An ambitious exhibition considers the artist’s deep and abiding connection to this cross-cultural region, where he made many of his most important contributions to modern art. Picasso and the Allure of the South presents 77 paintings, drawings and collages – approximately half of which have never been seen in the U.S. – from the Musée national Picasso-Paris, which holds the most significant collection of the artist’s work. Encompassing an exceptional selection of portraits, still lifes, figural studies and landscapes that reflect Picasso’s career-long rapport with the cultures of his homeland and southern France, the exhibition offers a new point of entry to the study of Picasso’s celebrated work. The exhibition will be on view at The Dalí Museum, the sole venue, beginning in January 2022.

 

       Picasso and the Allure of the South is organized in collaboration with the Musée national Picasso-Paris and curated by Dr. William Jeffett, The Dalí’s chief curator. An illustrated catalog with essays by Jeffett and Emilia Philippot, the head of collections at Musée national Picasso-Paris, accompanies the exhibition.

 

        “In partnership with the incomparable Musée national Picasso-Paris, The Dalí is proud to share this far-reaching exploration of the gravitational pull of southern Europe for Picasso and how it profoundly shaped his perspective, techniques and vision,” said Dr. Hank Hine, executive director of The Dalí. “Picasso and the Allure of the Southrepresents an exceedingly rare opportunity to experience masterworks by the artist through the innovative lens of place and cultural context.”

 

       Picasso was born in Málaga, Spain, in 1881, and went on to become one of the most influential and celebrated artists of the 20th century. His travels and studios in northern Spain and the south of France, sites he returned to throughout his versatile career, were central to his towering creative achievements.

 

       Organized by the years that Picasso was active in certain cities and regions in northern Spain and southern France, the exhibition features a wide range of the artist’s subjects, genres and styles dating from 1909 to 1972. Through a selection of drawings and collage, the first section addresses how specific places in northern Spain and in southern France – far from the major cities of Paris and Barcelona – inspired Picasso’s early experimentation and evolution of Cubism. Section two examines his shift to a more playful approach to Cubist idioms and considers to what extent the environment of the south impacted his compositions. The third section explores Picasso’s fascination with bullfights in a variety of media, as well as his use of the bull as a personal and political symbol. The exhibition concludes with a look at Picasso’s restless pictorial invention as he turned to the styles of surrealism and realism to develop a rich synthesis of the light and color of the south.

 

       Highlights of the exhibition include several works that have never been on display in the U.S., including the canvasses 

Portrait de Madame Rosenburg et sa fille (1918), 

Femme au buffet (1936) 

and La Baiser (1969) (Below). 

Among the other exceptional works to be showcased are Nature morte à la table servie (1913), 

Paysage de Juan-les-Pins(1920), 

Femmes dans un intérieur (1936) 

and Musicien (1972).

     

 

PICASSO Pablo
Musicien
Mougins, 26 mai 1972
Huile sur toile
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Dation Pablo Picasso, 1979. MP229
© 2021 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

PICASSO Pablo
Le Baiser
Mougins, 26 octobre 1969
Huile sur toile
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Dation Pablo Picasso, 1979. MP220
© 2021 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

About The Dalí Museum

       The Dalí Museum, located in the heart of picturesque downtown St. Petersburg, Florida, is home to an unparalleled collection of over 2,400 Salvador Dalí works, including nearly 300 oil paintings, watercolors and drawings, as well as more than 2,100 prints, photographs, posters, textiles, sculptures and objets d’art. The Museum’s nonprofit mission, to care for and share its collection locally and internationally, is grounded by a commitment to education and sustained by a culture of philanthropy.

 

       The Dalí is recognized internationally by the Michelin Guide with a three-star rating; has been deemed “one of the top buildings to see in your lifetime” by AOL Travel News; and named one of the 10 most interesting museums in the world by Architectural Digest. The building itself is a work of art, with a geodesic glass bubble nicknamed The Enigma, which features 1,062 triangular glass panels, a fitting tribute to Salvador Dalí’s legacy of innovation and transformation.

 

       The Dalí Museum is located at One Dalí Boulevard, St. Petersburg, Florida, 33701. For more information visit TheDali.org.

Ralston Crawford: Air & Space & War

Brandywine River Museum of Art 

June 20, 2021 - September 19, 2021

Ralston Crawford (1906-1978), Factory with Yellow Center Shape, 1947, oil on canvas, 28 x 40 in. Vilcek Collection, VF2013.01.01

The Brandywine River Museum of Art will reopen to the public on Sunday, June 20, 2021, with a new special exhibition, Ralston Crawford: Air & Space & War. During its temporary closure, the Museum underwent several facility renovations. Additionally, the Museum’s other galleries have been refreshed with paint and rehung with a new selection of recent acquisitions and loans, as well as rarely seen works from the permanent collection. 

On view through September 19, 2021, Ralston Crawford: Air & Space & War will explore U.S. aviation and military history through the art and personal experiences of the renowned American Modernist Ralston Crawford. Organized by the Vilcek Foundation, in collaboration with the Brandywine, this focused exhibition will feature an extensive collection of nearly 80 works by the artist, including drawings, photographs, paintings and lithographs from the 1940s that narrate his involvement with aerospace and World War II.

Ralston Crawford (1906-1978), Plane Propeller on Tarmac, 1945, photograph, 3 1/2 x 5 1/2 in. Vilcek Collection

Highlighting Crawford’s encounters with aviation and war from many angles, the collected works illustrate the influence of the artist’s own military service in the U.S. Army Air Force, as well as the commissions he undertook at the Curtiss-Wright Aircraft Plant in Buffalo, and his assignment to document nuclear weapons tests conducted by the U.S. Joint Army/Navy Task Force at Bikini Atoll for Fortune Magazine in 1946. 

“Ralston Crawford: Air + Space + War traces the dramatic evolution of Ralston Crawford’s art in the 1940s, which was influenced by aviation—from his personal experiences in flight, to his exposure to the construction of airplanes and his knowledge of the destruction they wrought in war,” said Emily Schuchardt Navratil, curator for the Vilcek Foundation. “Crawford’s insight into warcraft as a result of the Curtiss-Wright commission and his experience—from knowledge of aircraft, of military exercise and of propaganda—forged the themes that he would explore for the rest of his artistic career,” added Vilcek Foundation President Rick Kinsel. “His mature works vibrate with tension, rendering elements of war, culture, and ritual, with horror and awe—and beauty.”

Brandywine River Museum of Art reopens June 20, 2021, following a renovation and refresh of its galleries during the pandemic. Heritage Gallery. Photo by J. Fusco for VISIT PHILADELPHIA®

In the late 1920s, Crawford studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and the Barnes Foundation in Merion, and then later lived and painted in Exton and Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania in the late 1930s. He was also a visiting art instructor at the Art Academy of Cincinnati in 1940. In World War II, he served in the Weather Division of the Army Air Force, heading the Visual Presentation unit—where he created pictorial representations of weather patterns for airplane pilots—and continued working as an artist throughout the war. During that time, he was exposed to “endless plane tragedies,” which he recorded in works like Bomber, 1944, and Air War, 1944. As the exhibition will illuminate, these experiences had a profound impact on Crawford and marked a major turning point in his life and art. 

In addition to this landmark exhibition, the Museum has a full slate of engaging virtual and socially distant in-person events scheduled throughout the summer. All upcoming events can be found at www.brandywine.org/events. More details on the exhibition can be found at www.brandywine.org/crawford.

Visitation information is available at www.brandywine.org/reopening

Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group

Albuquerque Museum opens June 26, 2021

Philbrook Museum of Art, from October 17, 2021 to February 20, 2022 

Artis—Naples, The Baker Museum, from March 26 to July 24, 2022

Crocker Art Museum from August 28 to November 20, 2022

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, from December 18, 2022 to April 16, 2023

Agnes Pelton (American, born Germany, 1881–1961), Winter, 1933. Oil on canvas, 30 x 28 in. Crocker Art Museum.

The major traveling exhibition Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group kicks off this summer.

This landmark museum exhibition—the first exhibition of this important group of American modernists to be shown beyond New Mexico’s borders, and the first to be accompanied by a major scholarly publication—is devoted to an often overlooked group of 20th century abstract artists who pursued enlightenment and spiritual illumination. Organized by independent curator Michael Duncan and the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, Calif., this survey of 85 works made by the 11 visionary abstractionists is drawn from a variety of private and public collections including the Crocker’s. It aims to provide a broad perspective on the group’s work and reposition it within the history of modern painting and 20th century American art. The groundbreaking show will be accompanied by a fully illustrated publication by Duncan and other scholars, including the Crocker’s Associate Director and Chief Curator Scott A. Shields, who assert the group’s artists as crucial contributors to an alternative through line in modern art history, one with renewed relevance today. The traveling exhibition opens at the Albuquerque Museum on June 26, 2021, and then travels to four additional venues (see schedule at end).

The Transcendental Painting Group (New Mexico, 1938): Bess Harris, R. S. Horton, Bisttram´s mother, Lawren Harris, Marion Bisttram, Robert Gribbroek, Emil Bisttram, Isabel McLaughlin, and Raymond Johnson

“These motivated individuals transformed the dramatic natural surroundings of the Southwest into luminous reflections of the human spirit,” says Shields, a leading specialist in the art of California and the American West. “This sets their work apart from abstraction made in Europe at the same time—that and the otherworldly beauty and quality of the artwork itself. Well connected, well read, but isolated geographically, the artists sought to connect and communicate with viewers through potently charged symbols and dynamic relationships of color and form.”

Raymond Johnson (1891-1982) Oil No. 2, 1942. Oil on canvas, 42 x 36 in. Crocker Art Museum.

“Despite the quality of their works, this group of Southwest artists have been neglected in most surveys of American art, their paintings rarely exhibited outside of New Mexico,” said Duncan, who originally planned the exhibition nearly a decade ago. A corresponding editor for Art in America whose writings have focused on maverick artists of the 20th century and West Coast modernism, he asserts that “as we settle into the 21st century, the ‘spiritual’ seems no longer a complete taboo, and art history is undergoing a vast sea change.”

The Transcendental Painting Group achieved their modernity through potently charged shapes, patterns, and archetypes that they believed dwelled in the “collective unconscious.” The artists looked to a wide variety of literary, religious, and philosophical forces, including Zen Buddhism, Theosophy, Agni Yoga, Carl Jung, and Friedrich Nietzsche, and were greatly impacted by the Russian-born artist and theoretician Wassily Kandinsky. Convinced that an art capable of being intuitively understood would have equal validity to representational painting in an era of uncertainty, political divide, and fear, they attempted to promote abstraction that pursued enlightenment and spiritual illumination. Their manifesto stated their purpose: “To carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world, through new concepts of space, color, light and design, to imaginative realms that are idealistic and spiritual.”

The group was co-founded by New Mexico painters Raymond Jonson (1891–1982), today a vastly underrated figure in the development of abstraction in the United States who generally pursued a rigorous clarity in his art and was the stalwart backbone of the group, and Emil Bisttram (1895–1976), a key Southwest modernist, whose work evidenced a calculated precision that demonstrated his interest in the theory of Dynamic Symmetry and geometry’s potential for occult symbolism.

Stuart Walker (American, 1904–1940), Composition 55 (Convergence), 1938. Oil on canvas, 44 x 35 in. Courtesy of the Jean Pigozzi Collection.

All of the artists in the TPG sought to imbue their art with unforgettable, affecting metaphors, symbols, and visions, employing the freewheeling imagery of Surrealism to depict a transfigured, spiritually alive America. Agnes Pelton (1881–1961), increasingly appreciated today for her shimmering, celestial forms, was the honorary president of the group and its educational arm, the American Foundation for Transcendental Painting. Lawren Harris (1885–1970), of Canada, was the group’s only non-American member and known primarily for his light-filled, sharply delineated mountain landscapes. Florence Miller Pierce (1918–2007), the youngest member, created stunning paintings and drawings using geometric and biomorphic forms. Horace Pierce (1916–1958), who created graph-like and spiraling geometries in space, was also an experimental filmmaker.

Ed Garman (American, 1914-2004) Abstract No. 276, 1942. Oil on Masonite, 30 x 30 in. Collection of Shane Qualls, Cincinnati, OH.

Robert Gribbroek (1906–1971) was a fine artist, commercial art director, and layout artist for Hollywood animation studios; William Lumpkins (1909–2000), the only New Mexico native of the group, produced expressive watercolors that were the most unrefined and expressionistic, his style manifesting his interest in Zen Buddhism and Eastern thought; Stuart Walker’s (1904–1940) layered, swooping pastel forms embody transformative movement, growth, and enlightenment (pictured); and Ed Garman (1914–2004) was an idealist who took an improvisatory but analytical approach to his abstract compositions.

Also included in the survey are paintings by Dane Rudhyar (1895–1985), a philosopher, composer, artist, poet, novelist, and astrologer. Though not an official TPG member, his writings were critical in the group’s formation and cohesion.

The show includes striking, sublime works such as Oversoul (circa 1941), a warm, lyrical oil by Bisttram; Pelton’s stylized, shimmering Birthday (1943), that depicts the hallucinatory aura of the desert sky and landscape; and an ethereal, sensuous 1938 canvas by Walker invoking an idealized landscape of hills and clouds.

The exhibition is the sum of an astonishing array of loans and includes works drawn from the Crocker’s permanent collection including Winter (1933), a radiant, vibrant painting by Pelton, who sometimes incorporated representational elements that she felt could assist on the path to inner awareness and whose masterful and delicate abstractions have since the 1990s been rediscovered. The Crocker has also contributed two paintings by Jonson, a critical figure in expanding Southwest art beyond landscape painting and regional depictions to incorporate the light, color, and spirit of New Mexico in rich, metaphorical abstraction. These works, both from the early 1940s, demonstrate his interest in mechanical forms. Jonson, Duncan points out, himself became a strong advocate of Pelton’s work, praising her work for its luminosity.

Florence Miller Pierce (American, 1918-2007) Blue Forms, 1942. Oil on canvas, 29 3/4 x 34 in. Collection of Georgia and Michael de Havenon, New York.

“Another World” is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated exhibition catalogue (Delmonico Books, 2021). Revelatory, in-depth essays by Duncan; Shields; art historian, author, and independent curator Malin Wilson Powell; Catherine Whitney, a curator with a specialization in the regional Taos and Santa Fe painters; and Ilene Susan Fort, Curator Emerita at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; comprise the most significant contribution to the study and understanding of the group to date. The texts range from an exploration of the group in light of their international artistic peers, to their involvement with esoteric thought and Theosophy, their sources in the culture and landscape of the American Southwest, and the experience of its two female members. The handsome, colorful volume features stand-alone essays on each member, an illustrated chronology of the group with archival photography and ephemera, and an extended excerpt from Rudhyar’s polemical unpublished 1938 treatise positioning Transcendental art as a redemptive 20th century movement.

In the opening essay, “Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group,” Duncan asserts the group as contributors to an alternative approach to abstraction and places their art within the history of modern painting and 20th century American art. While Shields, in his “The Transcendental Painting Group and Significant Abstraction,” argues that while their art very often shares formal resemblances to that of modernist pioneers like Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O’Keeffe, “it was not the lack of an objective stimulus that set their work apart from that of their predecessors but a difference in motivation,” and that the group’s 19th century definition of Transcendentalism “gave way to the idea that art should be focused on the relationship between the maker’s inner self and the divine, rather than nature and the divine.”

Emil Bisttram (American, born Romania, 1895–1976), Oversoul, c. 1941. Oil on Masonite, 35 1/2 x 26 1/2 in. Private collection.